Layered depth-of-field rendering using color spreading

Depth of field (DoF) is a depth range outside of which objects are blurred. DoF has been widely used in photography and films by artists and is expected to be applied to realistic image rendering and virtual reality applications in the area of computer graphics. This paper presents a framework that produces DoF effect with high quality and performance. It is a layered method rendering the scene into layers where spreading filter is used to directly get the output, reduce memory usage and improve the result comparing with other layered methods using gathering filter. Depth peeling is used to solve partial occlusion problem and modified to discard the insignificant occluded pixels so as to reduce the number of occluded layers. This framework can also eliminate artifacts such as intensity leakage and depth discontinuity, and is GPU-friendly.