Depth-of-Field Segmentation for Near-lossless Image Compression and 3D Reconstruction

Over the years, photometric three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction gained increasing importance in several disciplines, especially in cultural heritage preservation. While increasing sizes of images and datasets enhanced the overall reconstruction results, requirements in storage got immense. Additionally, unsharp areas in the background have a negative influence on 3D reconstructions algorithms. Handling the sharp foreground differently from the background simultaneously helps to reduce storage size requirements and improves 3D reconstruction results. In this article, we examine regions outside the Depth of Field (DoF) and eliminate their inaccurate information to 3D reconstructions. We extract DoF maps from the images and use them to handle the foreground and background with different compression backends, making sure that the actual object is compressed losslessly. Our algorithm achieves compression rates between 1:8 and 1:30 depending on the artifact and DoF size and improves the 3D reconstruction.