Jitter noise modeling and its removal using recursive least squares in shape from focus systems

Three-dimensional shape recovery from the set of 2D images has many applications in computer vision and related fields. Passive techniques of 3D shape recovery utilize a single view point and one of these techniques is Shape from Focus or SFF. In SFF systems, a stack of images is taken with a single camera by manipulating its focus settings. During the image acquisition, the inter-frame distance or the sampling step size is predetermined and assumed constant. However, in a practical situation, this step size cannot remain constant due to mechanical vibrations of the translational stage, causing jitter. This jitter produces Jitter noise in the resulting focus curves. Jitter noise is invisible in every image, because all images in the stack are exposed to the same error in focus; thus, limiting the use of traditional noise removal techniques. This manuscript formulates a model of Jitter noise based on Quadratic function and the Taylor series. The proposed method, then, solves the jittering problem for SFF systems through recursive least squares (RLS) filtering. Different noise levels were considered during experiments performed on both real as well as simulated objects. A new metric measure is also proposed, referred to as depth distortion (DD), which calculates the number of pixels contributing to the RMSE in percentage. The proposed measure is used along with the RMSE and correlation, to compute and test the reconstructed shape quality. The results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.