Abstract
Currently the 3-D cameras available in the market use separate methods to capture 3-D information of the environment along with 2-D images which are complex and expensive, limiting their applications. Whereas, the passive methods like shape-from-focus are well-organized, requiring only the use of simple focus measure operators. An inherent weakness of focus-based method is that they are computationally extensive as they are required to search for all 3-D space for the best focused points, and also depend on the inter-frame distances, increasing the 3-D search space. In this paper, we have proposed a new method as a solution to decrease the high cost involved in 3-D cameras. The images are taken by varying the focus value and the magnitude of step size. Each pixel in the image is taken as a single measurement; and the results are compared with the earlier methods.