Coded Aperture Flow

Real cameras have a limited depth of field. The resulting defocus blur is a valuable cue for estimating the depth structure of a scene. Using coded apertures, depth can be estimated from a single frame. For optical flow estimation between frames, however, the depth dependent degradation can introduce errors. These errors are most prominent when objects move relative to the focal plane of the camera. We incorporate coded aperture defocus blur into optical flow estimation and allow for piecewise smooth 3D motion of objects. With coded aperture flow, we can establish dense correspondences between pixels in succeeding coded aperture frames. We compare several approaches to compute accurate correspondences for coded aperture images showing objects with arbitrary 3D motion.