Yoav Y. Schechner, Nahum Kiryati and Ronen Basri, 1998.
Separation of transparent layers using focus.
Proc. ICCV, pp. 1061-1066.
Also submitted to the IJCV.
Consider situations where the depth at each point in the scene is
multi-valued, due to the presence of a virtual image semi-reflected by a
transparent surface. The semi-reflected image is linearly superimposed on
the image of the object that is behind the transparent surface. A novel
approach is proposed for the recovery of the superimposed layers. By
searching for the images in which either of the objects (layers), is
focused, the transparent areas are detected and an estimate of the depth
map of each layer is obtained. As a result of the focusing, an initial
separation of the layers is achieved. The separation is enhanced via
mutual blurring of the perturbing components in the images, based on the
depths estimate and the parameters of the imaging system.