Abstract In this paper, we introduce robust and synergetic handcrafted features and a simple but efficient deep feature from a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture for defocus estimation. This paper systematically analyzes the effectiveness of different features, and shows how each feature can compensate for the weaknesses of other features when they are concatenated. For a full defocus map estimation, we extract image patches on strong edges sparsely, after which we use them for deep and hand-crafted feature extraction. In order to reduce the degree of patch-scale dependency, we also propose a multi-scale patch extraction strategy. A sparse defocus map is generated using a neural network classifier followed by a probability-joint bilateral filter. The final defocus map is obtained from the sparse defocus map with guidance from an edge-preserving filtered input image. Experimental results show that our algorithm is superior to state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of defocus estimation. Our work can be used for applications such as segmentation, blur magnification, all-in-focus image generation, and 3-D estimation