Stay focused
For photographers, it's sometimes difficult to keep both the foreground and background of an image in focus. Focusing somewhere between the two can ensure that neither is blurry; but neither will be particularly sharp, either. On Friday, at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision in Kyoto, Japan, members of the MIT Graphics Group will show that combining several low-quality exposures with different focal depths can yield a sharper photo than a single, higher-quality exposure. Given enough time, a digital camera could take a dozen well-exposed photos, and software could stitch them into a perfectly focused composite. But if the scene is changing, or if the photographer is trying to hold the camera steady by hand, there may not be time for a dozen photos. When time is short, says postdoc Sam Hasinoff, lead author on the paper, "there's a trade-off between blur, on the one hand — not having...