Removing Partial Occlusion from Blurred Thin Occluders

We present a method to remove partial occlusion that arises from out-of-focus thin foreground occluders such as wires, branches, or a fence. Such partial occlusion causes the irradiance at a pixel to be a weighted sum of the radiances of a blurred foreground occluder and that of the background. The result is that the background component has lower contrast than it would if seen without the occluder. In order to remove the contribution of the foreground in such regions, we characterize the position and size of the occluder in a narrow aperture image. In subsequent images with wider apertures, we use this characterization to remove the contribution of the foreground, thereby restoring contrast in the background. We demonstrate our method on real camera images without assuming that the background is static.