AIM 2019 Challenge on Bokeh Effect Synthesis: Methods and Results
Andrey Ignatov, Jagruti H. Patel, Radu Timofte, Bolun Zheng, Xin Ye, Li Huang, Xiang Tian, Saikat Dutta, Kuldeep Purohit, Praveen Kandula, Maitreya Suin, Ambasamudram Narayanan Rajagopalan, Zhiwei Xiong, Jie Huang, Guanting Dong, Mingde Yao, Dong Liu, Ming Hong, Wenying Lin, Yanyun Qu · 2019
This paper reviews the first AIM challenge on bokeh effect synthesis with the focus on proposed solutions and results. The participating teams were solving a real-world image-to-image mapping problem, where the goal was to map standard narrow-aperture photos to the same photos captured with a shallow depth-of-field by the Canon 70D DSLR camera. In this task, the participants had to restore bokeh effect based on only one single frame without any additional data from other cameras or sensors. The target metric used in this challenge combined fidelity scores (PSNR and SSIM) with solutions' perceptual results measured in a user study. The proposed solutions significantly improved baseline results, defining the state-of-the-art for practical bokeh effect simulation.