MFFW: A new dataset for multi-focus image fusion
This provides a new benchmark for researchers in computational photography to test algorithms against defocus spread effect, but it is incremental as it focuses on dataset creation rather than method innovation.
The paper tackles the problem of evaluating multi-focus image fusion methods on real-world images with defocus spread effect by constructing a new dataset called MFFW, which contains 19 pairs of images and shows that most state-of-the-art methods fail to generate satisfactory results on it.
Multi-focus image fusion (MFF) is a fundamental task in the field of computational photography. Current methods have achieved significant performance improvement. It is found that current methods are evaluated on simulated image sets or Lytro dataset. Recently, a growing number of researchers pay attention to defocus spread effect, a phenomenon of real-world multi-focus images. Nonetheless, defocus spread effect is not obvious in simulated or Lytro datasets, where popular methods perform very similar. To compare their performance on images with defocus spread effect, this paper constructs a new dataset called MFF in the wild (MFFW). It contains 19 pairs of multi-focus images collected on the Internet. We register all pairs of source images, and provide focus maps and reference images for part of pairs. Compared with Lytro dataset, images in MFFW significantly suffer from defocus spread effect. In addition, the scenes of MFFW are more complex. The experiments demonstrate that most state-of-the-art methods on MFFW dataset cannot robustly generate satisfactory fusion images. MFFW can be a new baseline dataset to test whether an MMF algorithm is able to deal with defocus spread effect.