Bokeh Rendering with a Physical Lens

Abstract

Bokeh is important for the realism and aesthetics of graphical rendering, but hard to simulate. In this paper, we propose a novel method that conceptually shoots a 3D display with a physical camera. While a high-quality 3D display is not available, we render the 3D scene layer by layer on a 2D display, and shoot each rendered layer with a physical camera whose focus is adjusted to produce the right amount of blurs. The pure colours and opacities of each layer are extracted by a matting technique and then combined into a single image by alpha blending. The proposed method provides an alternative to bokeh simulation by purely computational algorithms.