US Patent 9298006 Layered light field reconstruction for defocus blur

An algorithm may reconstruct defocus blur from a sparsely sampled light field. Light field samples are generated, using stochastic rasterization or ray tracing as examples. Then the samples are partitioned into depth layers. These depth layers are filtered independently and then combined together, taking into account inter-layer visibility. Since each layer corresponds to a smaller depth range, it results in more effective reconstruction filters than previous approaches.