Abstract

We propose modifying the aperture of a conventional color camera so that the effective aperture size for one color channel is smaller than that for the other two. This produces an image where different color channels have different depths-of-field, and from this we can computa- tionally recover scene depth, reconstruct an all-focus image and achieve synthetic re-focusing, all from a single shot. These capabilities are en- abled by a spatio-spectral image model that encodes the statistical rela- tionship between gradient profiles across color channels. This approach substantially improves depth accuracy over alternative single-shot coded- aperture designs, and since it avoids introducing additional spatial dis- tortions and is light efficient, it allows high-quality deblurring and lower exposure times. We demonstrate these benefits with comparisons on syn- thetic data, as well as results on images captured with a prototype lens.