Innovations in depth from focus/defocus pave the way to more capable computer vision systems

In several applications of computer vision, such as augmented reality and self-driving cars, estimating the distance between objects and the camera is an essential task. Depth from focus/defocus is one of the techniques that achieve such a process using the blur in the images as a clue. Depth from focus/defocus usually requires a stack of images of the same scene taken with different focus distances, a technique known as "focal stack."