A fully automatic digital camera image refocusing algorithm

One of the greatest dissatisfiers of consumer digital cameras is autofocus failure. One possible solution currently being investigated by many digital camera manufacturers involves capturing a sequence of through-focus images and postprocessing to produce a desired focused image. Most approaches require significant manual input to define a region of interest (ROI) to be optimized for focus. A new through-focus algorithm is proposed that automatically partitions scene content into regions based on range and then automatically determines the ROI for a given range. When this ROI is combined with standard image fusion operations, this algorithm generates an image with an aesthetically pleasing narrow depth-of-field effect, all with little or no user input, and all within the limited compute environment of a digital camera.