A defocus and similarity attention-based cascaded network for multi-focus and misaligned image fusion

Multi-focus image fusion uses multiple images focused on different depths to generate a clear image covering the whole scene. The existing multi-focus image fusion methods do not consider the defocus successive variation in close-range photography and the camera shaking in sequence image shooting, and most methods cannot process multiple images simultaneously. We proposed an end-to-end deep learning network to generate the all-in-focus image from multi-focus and misaligned images to solve these problems. Specifically, taking multiple multi-focus and misaligned source images as input, our Defocus and Similarity Attention Fusion Network (DSAF-Net) first generates the corresponding defocus map through the Defocus-Net, and warps the source images and defocus maps to a unified camera view according to the optical flow estimated by the OpticalFlow-Net. Finally, our model applies a coarse-to-fine correspondence matching scheme to obtain the similarity weight maps, combined with the warped source images and defocus maps to fuse into a clear image. For training and testing our DSAF-Net, a multi-focus and misaligned cultural heritage photography dataset (WHU-MFM) is constructed using Blender Cycles renderer. Experiments results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. DSAF-Net is available at https:// github.com/PeimingCHEN/DSAF-Net. And WHU-MFM is available at https://github.com/PeimingCHEN/WHUMFM-Dataset.