Digital restoration of defocused images in the wavelet domain

Abstract

Many cameras nowadays are equipped with an autofocus mechanism that attempts to take pictures at the best possible focus. However, there are situations in which the pictures are still out of focus, such as when the photographer has mistakenly focused at a wrong position or when the focusing region consists of objects of different depths and therefore confuses the autofocus system. With a digital camera, we can attempt to use digital image-restoration techniques to bring the pictures back into focus. We design an algorithm that restores the image by digitally enhancing the corresponding frequency bands. We employ the restoration in the wavelet domain so that this restoration scheme can be compliant with JPEG 2000, which is positioned to succeed JPEG as the next image-compression standard and has the potential to be widely adopted by the digital photography industry owing to its many advanced features. © 2002 Optical Society of America.