Simultaneous estimation of super-resolved intensity and depth maps from low resolution defocused observations of a scene

This paper presents a novel technique to simultaneously estimate the depth map and the focused image of a scene, both at a super-resolution, from its defocused observations. Given a sequence of low resolution, blurred and noisy observations of a static scene, the problem is to generate a dense depth map at a resolution higher than one that can be generated from the observations as well as to estimate the true focused, super-resolved image. Both the depth and the intensity maps are modeled as separate Markov random fields (MRF) and a maximum a posteriori estimation method is used to recover the high resolution fields. Since there is no relative motion between the scene and the camera, as is the case with most of the super-resolution and structure recovery techniques, we do away with the correspondence problem.