Learning Lens Blur Fields: Unveiling Subtle Optical Differences in Smartphones

Researchers introduce a novel method for representing lens blur using a multilayer perceptron (MLP), accurately capturing variations in the 2D point spread function (PSF) across image-plane location, focus setting, and depth. By modeling smartphones and DSLRs, they've created the first dataset of 5D blur fields, revealing—for the first time—subtle optical differences between seemingly identical phone models. This technology enables differentiating phone optics, image deblurring, and rendering more realistic blur effects, opening exciting applications.