Using Opaque Image Blur for Real-Time Depth-of-Field Rendering

While depth of field is an important cinematographic means, its use in real-time computer graphics is still limited by the computational costs that are necessary to achieve a sufficient image quality. Specifically, color bleeding artifacts between objects at different depths are most effectively avoided by a decomposition into subimages and the independent blurring of each sub-image. This decomposition, however, can result in rendering artifacts at silhouettes of objects. While various algorithms have been suggested to eliminate these artifacts, we propose a new blur filter that increases the opacity of all pixels to avoid artifacts at the cost of physically less accurate but still plausible rendering results. The proposed filter is named “opaque image blur” and is based on a glow filter that is applied to the alpha channel. We present a highly efficient GPU-based pyramid algorithm that implements this filter for depth-of-field rendering.