Variable Aperture Bokeh Rendering via Customized Focal Plane Guidance

TL;DR

This paper introduces a controllable bokeh rendering method that allows precise focal plane and aperture customization, supported by a new dataset, achieving realistic effects with a lightweight model.

Contribution

It presents a novel controllable bokeh rendering approach with user-defined focal and aperture control, and introduces the Variable Aperture Bokeh Dataset (VABD) for improved learning.

Findings

Achieved state-of-the-art bokeh rendering performance.

Model is lightweight with only 4.4 million parameters.

Demonstrated effectiveness on public and new datasets.

Abstract

Bokeh rendering is one of the most popular techniques in photography. It can make photographs visually appealing, forcing users to focus their attentions on particular area of image. However, achieving satisfactory bokeh effect usually presents significant challenge, since mobile cameras with restricted optical systems are constrained, while expensive high-end DSLR lens with large aperture should be needed. Therefore, many deep learning-based computational photography methods have been developed to mimic the bokeh effect in recent years. Nevertheless, most of these methods were limited to rendering bokeh effect in certain single aperture. There lacks user-friendly bokeh rendering method that can provide precise focal plane control and customised bokeh generation. There as well lacks authentic realistic bokeh dataset that can potentially promote bokeh learning on variable apertures. To address these two issues, in this paper, we have proposed an effective controllable bokeh rendering method, and contributed a Variable Aperture Bokeh Dataset (VABD). In the proposed method, user can customize focal plane to accurately locate concerned subjects and select target aperture information for bokeh rendering. Experimental results on public EBB! benchmark dataset and our constructed dataset VABD have demonstrated that the customized focal plane together aperture prompt can bootstrap model to simulate realistic bokeh effect. The proposed method has achieved competitive state-of-the-art performance with only 4.4M parameters, which is much lighter than mainstream computational bokeh models. The contributed dataset and source codes will be released on github https://github.com/MoTong-AI-studio/VABM.