Automatic foreground-background refocusing

A challenging problem in image restoration is to recover an image with a blurry foreground. Such images can easily occur with modern cameras, when the auto-focus aims mistakenly at the background (which will appear sharp) instead of the foreground, where usually the object of interest is. In this paper we propose an automatic procedure that (i) estimates the amount of out-of-focus blur, (ii) segments the image into foreground and background incorporating clues from the blurriness, (iii) recovers the sharp foreground, and finally (iv) blurs the background to refocus the scene. On several real photographs with blurry foreground and sharp background, we demonstrate the effectiveness and limitations of our method.