Temporal Consistency For Still Image Based Defocus Blur Estimation Methods

Many Defocus blur estimation methods have been proposed in recent years but, when applied to video sequences in a frame-by-frame manner, they typically exhibit temporal inconsistencies or flickering. This paper presents a temporal coherence scheme that can be coupled to any existing defocus blur estimation for still images, aiming to produce spatio-temporally coherent defocus blur map videos. The proposed method is based on the design of a Kalman Filter which is applied on a patch level. Experimental results show that the proposed method can smooth out undesirable temporal fluctuations whilst still being able to preserve the abrupt local appearance changes due to motion, occlusions or dis-occlusions.