Recognition of Defocused Patterns

The paper addresses the recognition problem of defocused patterns. Though recognition algorithms assume that the input images are focused and sharp, it does not always hold on actual camera-captured images. Thus, a recognition method that can recognize defocused patterns is required. In this paper, we propose a novel recognition framework for defocused patterns, relying on a single camera without a depth sensor. The framework is based on the coded aperture which can recover a less-degraded image from a defocused image if depth is available. However, in the problem setting of “a single camera without a depth sensor,” estimating depth is ill-posed and an assumption is required to estimate the depth. To solve the problem, we introduce a new assumption suitable for pattern recognition; templates are known. It is based on the fact that in pattern recognition, all templates must be available in advance for training. The experiments confirmed that the proposed method is fast and robust to defocus and scaling, especially for heavily defocused patterns.