Simultaneous estimation of super-resolved scene and depth map from low resolution defocused observations

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. Super-resolution refers to the generation of high spatial resolution images from a sequence of low resolution images. Hitherto, the super-resolution technique has been restricted mostly to the intensity domain. In this paper, we extend the scope of super-resolution imaging to acquire depth estimates at high spatial resolution simultaneously. 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 high resolution focused image. Both the depth and the image 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.