Efficient Multi-Lens Bokeh Effect Rendering and Transformation

Tim Seizinger, Marcos V. Conde, Manuel Kolmet, Tom E. Bishop, Radu Timofte; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2023, pp. 1633-1642

Many advancements of mobile cameras aim to reach the visual quality of professional DSLR cameras. Great progress was shown over the last years in optimizing the sharp regions of an image and in creating virtual portrait effects with artificially blurred backgrounds. Bokeh is the aesthetic quality of the blur in out-of-focus areas of an image. This is a popular technique among professional photographers, and for this reason, a new goal in computational photography is to optimize the Bokeh effect itself. This paper introduces EBokehNet, a efficient state-of-the-art solution for Bokeh effect transformation and rendering. Our method can render Bokeh from an all-in-focus image, or transform the Bokeh of one lens to the effect of another lens without harming the sharp foreground regions in the image. Moreover we can control the shape and strength of the effect by feeding the lens properties i.e. type (Sony or Canon) and aperture, into the neural network as an additional input. Our method is a winning solution at the NTIRE 2023 Lens-to-Lens Bokeh Effect Transformation Challenge, and state-of-the-art at the EBB benchmark.