Arbitrary view and focus image generation: rendering object-based shifting and focussing effect by linear filtering

This paper presents a novel method to render shifting (parallax) and focussing effects on an object in a scene for generating a virtual view image with arbitrary focus. Two differently focused images of the same scene-near-focused image and far-focused image-are used as input under the assumption that a scene has near and far objects. The proposed method can freely handle the shifting and the focussing effect on each object according to the view point and the focus depth of the virtual camera only by linear filtering of the input images without any segmentation or modeling of the objects. Experimental results using real images are shown to test the performance of the method.