Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Tech Can Deblur Images Automatically
An anonymous reader writes "At the annual SIGGRAPH show, Microsoft Research showed new technology that can remove the blur from images on your camera or phone using on-board sensors — the same sensors currently added to the iPhone 4. No more blurry low light photos!"
Enhance!
Microsoft Research puts out a lot of really interesting and successful research. They aren't the people programming the OS or office applications.
I bet it can remove the blur from the titlebar for screenshots of a Windows 7 app. Now we can all see what those developers are viewing behind that window!
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
This is like one of those "Why didn't I think of that?" ideas that you wonder why your camera doesn't already have. The nice part is that it can be done very cheaply (relative to the cost of a camera) and would improve images in many cases. My only tiny little concern is that you might introduce artifacts into your photos - which makes me wonder if it wouldn't be better to store a raw image and the data from these sensors independently? I wonder if there is a scenario where you might be moving but the object you're taking a picture of is stationary relative to your movement. Like for example you're standing on a boat rocking in the waves, you take a photo of the deck, and this technology compensates for the rock which results in a ton of blur.
Maybe I failed to catch it from the article:
At the annual SIGGRAPH show, Microsoft Research showed new technology that can remove the blur from images on your camera or phone using on-board sensors -- the same sensors currently added to the iPhone 4. But WTF? Steve please!!! It's not always about you.
There is a lot of poor porn out there from people that can't hold a camera still. Microsoft should redeem itself and sort that out asap.
Finally, we'll have to quit making fun of the redhead cop every time he asks to zoom into a blurry license plate.
Probably only half-working coming from microsoft
It could be worse... the GIMP developers could have built it, in which case it would be a mostly working implementation of half the features of some existing software. However, nobody would realize this since only the developers would be able to comprehend the UI.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Step back! This is a job for Frankencamera. Run it on your Nokia N900 today.
OTOH having that Arduino board and a mess of wires attached to your camera does score you a lot more geek cred than photographing using an plain old mobile phone.
/greger
Social networking sites are about to get a whole lot more ugly
I recall that some other cameras, like a Casio I've seen a friend using, also do deblurring, but rather by stacking of rapid subframes (I guess using bright reference points). If I understand correctly, this new method is operated on a single frame. I wonder if anyone has a useful comparison of the hardware requirement/image quality/useability differences between the two methods?
Great, you can improve your motion blur removing algorithm by recording the motion which created the blur.
Although technically, the blur in the image itself already recorded the motion, with better precision and without calibration issues. So this is more of supplementary data. The before and after images leave out the whole "you can already do this without the extra sensor data" aspect.
And really, you'll get far better results if you just use an adequately short exposure time and some mechanical stabilization. Brace your shooting arm. If you want to get fancy, use something like Canon IS lenses.
Yeah, this is nifty, especially for smartphone based cameras which may already have built-in sensors to do this. But neither is it exactly revolutionary. You'll get better photos out of learning some basic photography than you will out of fancy sensors and analysis software.
Have you used GIMP in past 5 years?
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
That's the first thing that came to mind. Luckily, it's a hardware attachment so we can still tell people to fuck off when they come to us with blurry photos.
Unless they have the attachment.
Sounds like a great way to land a spot on a terrorist watch list, to me...
Are you unaware of what an image-processing algorithm is? Unless its usage defies laws of physics it won't be bricking anything. Adaptations in proprietary implementations will more than likely appear first in the next phone generation or later models if app developers do not beat them to it by hacking (probably poor or minimal) support onto current phones.
Is the camera needing to do something else at the time that "sucking processing power" is some sort of issue?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Single-window mode hasn't been released yet, but it's coming. This will make it usable for folks who aren't using fvwm with focus-follows-cursor.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Ding, ding ding... we have a winner! This description distills down the Gimp and its myriad issues into two sentences. Good job!
This is hardware that takes into account movement of the camera as you take a picture. Meh... I thought this was a software solution that could deblur a picture after it has been taken. This technology exists but I guess it's more used to get at redacted information rather than make a picture clearer. Seems like it could work though.
While it's a nice idea, isn't this just a poor man's image stabilization? Even cheap compacts come with some form of IS these days, and high end SLR lenses certainly do.
..and shame on you, camera manufacturers, for not thinking about this already!
Yes and no. There are limitations to how quickly and accurately the physical IS systems can work. Overall they're fantastic and well worth the premium if you're a serious shooter, but this could provide a much cheaper alternative that could be nearly as effective. Also, provided you have sufficiently accurate accelerometer data, you could reprocess the RAWs as deblurring algorithms improve for better results (check out the difference in noise reduction in the latest version of Adobe Camera RAW). This could also be really effective to fine-tune the IS done in-lens.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Those people should use a better setup. The lack of auto mouse focus default really makes windows desktop suck, plus the lack of workspaces.
For the past 8 years or so, MicroSoft has been co-author on more papers than any other organization at SIGGRAPH. This is impressive because SIGGRAPH has a the highest paper rejection rate of any conference I know of - they reject (or downgrade to non-published session) 85% of the paper submissions. And you have to submit publication-ready papers nearly a year in advance, with a video summary.
This reminds me of Xerox PARC - great R & D output, poor commercialization of these results. People wonder if their lab was a toy-of-Bill or a tax write-off.
My only tiny little concern is that you might introduce artifacts into your photos - which makes me wonder if it wouldn't be better to store a raw image and the data from these sensors independently? I wonder if there is a scenario where you might be moving but the object you're taking a picture of is stationary relative to your movement.
I suspect in the majority of cases, this would improve photos. As to your query, my first thought of a problematic environment would be trying to take a photo of a friend sitting next to you--in a moving roller coaster as it hurls around a bend. You and your friend are [mostly] stationary WRT each other, but you (and the camera) are all undergoing acceleration, which the camera dutifully attepts to remove from the photo. Certainly a comparatively rare event compared to the majority of photo-ops.
Those people should use a better setup.
Surprisingly enough, different people have different needs.
The lack of auto mouse focus default really makes windows desktop suck, plus the lack of workspaces.
I'm too much of a spaz to use focus-follows-mouse. Every time I try it I wind up bumping the mouse and typing into the wrong window. If I were a hardcode pre-trunk GIMP user I'd definitely have a session set up that way, though. Fortunately, the GIMP developers have come around to an option that works with most peoples' desktops.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
This is probably not "new technology".. just Microsoft's version of image stabilisation that "real" camera companies have been using for years. I sounds just like the in-camera image stabilisation used by many point & shoot cameras, and some dSLR's... and it would be VERY like Microsoft to copy someone else's technology and pass it off as a new thing. (just look at the Mach Kernel which underlies NT, 2000, XP, 2003 etc.. versions of Windows.)
Not unless you know the sizes of all the objects that made it into the frame, and the distance of each to the camera. The camera, without this sort of motion sensor, at most knows the focus distance and view angle, so *maybe* it can guess the height and width of objects at the plane of focus--but then the problem becomes knowing which pixels are recording the object at the plane of focus.
But anyway, if you know the focus distance, view angle and camera motion, you can apply some corrections that are likely to improve acutance of objects at the plane of focus, and maybe regain some resolution. It wouldn't turn a photo with motion blur into the equivalent of one without, because motion blur causes information loss, which will show up as loss of resolution. Or in other words, the correction will probably make large high-contrast edges look sharper, but there will be some loss of fine detail due to the motion.
Are you adequate?
Well, many cameras have optical vibration reduction, either on the lenses or using a sensor-shift mechanism. This mechanism, to the extent that it works, should work better than the software solution being described in the article.
It's important to understand that random camera motion blur in almost all cases leads to information loss. The rays of light that would have hit only one pixel if the camera had been steady, because of the motion, will end up hitting more than one pixel--whereas moving the lens elements or sensor tends to keep the same pixel aligned with the same point of the photographic subject.
My guess is that recording the motion of the camera and doing the post-processing described in the article will reintroduce some acutance to the image (high-contrast edges will be sharper), but that there will still be a significant loss of resolution (the finest detail that can be recorded). So, for example, the edge of a person's face will be reasonably sharp, but there won't be a lot of detail on the hair or skin.
Are you adequate?
Maybe he folds on his phone. Who knows, this is slashdot after all.
There are real limits to the human body. Anyone who says "I can hold a camera perfectly steady," is lying. We are not perfect platforms. So image stabilization can help a lot. Long range photography, in particular of fast moving objects like in sports, got a big boost when optical image stabilization came out. The length that you could zoom and still get a good shot increased. Wasn't that the photographers were bad, it was that they were at the human limits. The optical stabilizers enhanced that are upped the limits. After the fact deblurring could up the limits more.
It won't help at all if the object is moving. In fact, this feature should be switched off if you're trying to photograph a moving object with the camera (common enough, and not just in sports). It would not be able to compensate for a mismatch between the object speed and your tracking movement, and would do entirely the wrong thing even if you tracked the moving object perfectly for the shot. In this case, there is no substitute for adequate light and/or a fast lens and/or a smooth accurate tracking movement.
As another comment, deconvolution requires a very accurate approximation of the true convolution kernel, which may be provided by the motion sensors. However, to reconstruct the image without artifacts, the true kernel must not approach zero in the Fourier domain below the Nyquist frequency of the intended reconstruction (which is limited by the antialias filter in front of the Bayer mask). In fact, if the kernel's Fourier transform has too small a magnitude at some frequency, the reconstruction at that frequency will be essentially noise, or will be zero if adequate regularization is used. If the motion blur is more than a few pixels, this will generally mean that the reconstructed image will have an abridged spectrum in the direction of blur, compared to directions in which no blur occurred. Of course, if your hand is so shaky and the exposure so long that blur occurs in all directions, then the spectrum of the reconstructed image will be more uniform. It is likely to be truncated compared to the spectrum of an image taken without motion blur.
The quality of the reconstructed image would also be limited by the effects of other convolutions in the optical pathway. For instance, if you're using a cheap superzoom lens, don't expect to get anywhere near the antialias filter's Nyquist frequency in the final image, as the lens will have buggered up the details nonlinearly across the image even before the motion blur is added. If you're using nice lenses (Canon "L" series or Pentax "*" series and suchlike), then this will not be an issue.
The method would seem to be useful in low-ish light photography of stationary objects. A sober photographer would beat a drunk photographer at this, but the technique would help both to some extent. A photographer using a tripod would do best, of course.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
It could be worse... the GIMP developers could have built it, in which case it would be a mostly working implementation of half the features of some existing software. However, nobody would realize this since only the developers would be able to comprehend the UI.
If you don't like the GUI, there's always the Lisp interface. If another OSS project gets named after a disability, I'm sure the gimp devs will incorporate it somehow.
Also, if you want working de-blurring, try turning the lens's image stabilization on. This is something better suited to the optics than the sensor, and Canon and Nikon both do a very good job with image stabilization.
The question, IMO, isn't so much "is this doing the same thing as in-lens IS?" (Or, IIRC and you've got a Minolta, in-body IS.) The question is whether you can get any additional benefit over what IS gives you. From what I've heard, present IS systems give you about an extra stop of exposure time over what you'd be able to do without it. Does this give you two extra stops over no IS? If so, it's worth having as an option.
The lack of auto mouse focus default really makes windows desktop suck, plus the lack of workspaces.
Says you. When I'm working in a text editor or whatever, I like to move the mouse entirely out of that window's area so the cursor isn't distracting.
Funnily enough, different people have different preferences. Who'd have thunk it?
I have - it's shit. When's that new version coming out? Perhaps when it makes sense to anyone other than the devlopers it'll be allowed back into the standard Ubuntu distribution?
...a flying chair.
Table-ized A.I.
This is going to revolutionize the hentai industry.
I only run into the occasional problem with GIMP. They really have come a long way.
I switched from Photoshop to GIMP years ago. Photoshop kept crashing on my machine, and GIMP didn't. Then I found there were more things I could do with GIMP, so I stayed. Once in a while I try out Photoshop again, but I stay with GIMP. A few times, Photoshop folks have run into problems, so I tell them to just send me their file, and I fix it in GIMP and send it back. :)
But hey, it's a holy war. Sides have been drawn, and there are zealots on both sides who trash talk each other. Don't ever try to convince someone that the other is better, because it'll just be an argument. I don't play holy wars. I try both sides, and use what works best.
On the computer I'm using right now, it's a dual boot Windows 7 and Slackware64 machine. Windows 7 crashed yet again, with the only solution being "format and reinstall". Bah, I just did that a month before. Instead, I'm staying booted up in Slack64, and am very happy. My other copy of Windows is sitting in a VirutalBox window, which I only bring up for the odd occasions that I need to run a Windows only app. Will I convince a Windows user to switch to Linux? Probably not. Am I perfectly content? Yes.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
The whole premise seems kinda ridiculous. You might have some idea how the camera swung, but that only helps you if you're pointing at some 2D surface that's perpendicular to the camera.
If there is any depth to the scene, points closer will move more than points farther away. You might have an estimate of the distance from the auto-focus feature, but that's only going to help you fix up points near the focus sweet-spot. Points closer and farther away are going to be made worse, not better.
There's an old rule: Never do something in hardware that can be done in software. Just imagine that you could put this stuff easily into cellphones, which would never include a image stabilization as it is used in DSLRs right now, because it's too bulky and too expensive. All just with a software update.
Clearly (pun intended) the results have a ways to go yet. Look at the coca-cola image, at the 'a' on the end of the cola... that thing is hosed by the blur, and they're unable to recover it because there's no intermediate contrasting color. Same thing for the spokes on the car rims.
This problem can't be completely solved post-picture. Only large-scale elements with nothing else around them will yield pixel-sharp solutions.
The optimum way to correct blur is to apply active or passive (e.g. tripod) stabilization to the lens prior to the shot; active technology is already pretty decent (photographers tend to measure things in stops; it's intuitive to them... when they say an active stabilizer "gives you" four stops, for instance with Canon, what they mean is that you can shoot four stops slower with the shutter and you won't get blur from camera movement.) Doesn't solve subject movement at all, but then, nothing really does other than cranking down the exposure time.
So... considering lens stabilization has been in-camera for years, and this requires more hardware, but gives you less... I'm going to go out on a limb and say it isn't of interest to camera folks. Maybe in some esoteric role... a spacecraft or something else with a tight power budget where stabilization can't be done for some reason (certainly measurement takes less power than actual stabilization)... but DSLRs and point-and-shoots... no.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I'm not exactly sure what GP is using focus-follows-mouse for, but a window manager can sometimes do focus-follows-mouse-for-mouse and focus-follows-mouse-for-keyboard (those aren't standard names). I use the former to scroll one window while I type into another.
Now they just need to attach this to Ballmer's head to deblur the company vision a little.
You know, you -- and 99% of the others bitching about the Gimp -- you're utterly full of shit. I write commercial image processing / editing / animation / generation software for a living, I'm expert - you can read that as "terrifyingly exert" - with Photoshop, Gimp and a whole raft of others... and Gimp is an easy to use powerhouse.
Now I will grant you exactly ONE thing, and that is, you need to sit down and learn to use it. That should take a few hours if you're familiar with something (anything) else; maybe a week hunting down tutorials, or a day hanging with a qualified mentor, if editing bitmaps is all new to you.
If it takes you longer than that, you're either stupid or lazy.
There's *nothing* significantly wrong with the Gimp. It has its limits, like everything does (Photoshop has some really annoying limits too), but for the vast majority of image processing and touch-up needs, it's very nice.
Oh, mommie, my crop function is in a different menu... Some people just need a good smack in the head.
If you really knew what you were doing, you'd have, and use, a whole suite of these programs, because for the big ones, there are areas where they excel, and that's the time to put them into play. If you can't learn to use them because the keystrokes are different, or there is a different paradigm... it isn't the program that sucks. It's you.
Also, if you actually knew how to use them, you wouldn't be bitching about them.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Well, the algorithm they are using is real enough, but that is a high-end Canon DSLR. The ultrasonic logo on the lens is clearly visible. Which means these guys have a hell of a lot of low-noise pixels to work with, and it also means they have very fine control over the number of pixels the blur can cross.
How to remove camera shake with a DSLR, 4-step plan:
* Use a high-end DSLR which can take pictures at ISO 3200 with the same noise content of point-and-shoots at ISO 400. 3 stops.
* Use a fast L series prime lens (like, say, a 50mm F1.2L), or use an IS lens. That's another 3 stops.
* Use a camera with 20+ low-noise mega pixels. Then reduce the pixel count to 0.5x on each axis. Hell, this is a high-end Canon, you might as well reduce the pixel count to 0.25x. 2 more stops.
Uh.. how many stops so far? 8 stops so far. That isn't enough? WAIT, THERE'S MORE!
The single best way to reduce Camera blur with a high end Canon or Nikon DSLR ... (drum roll) ....
HOLD DOWN THE SHUTTER BUTTON AND TAKE 5-7 SHOTS. Then pick out the best one in post-production. Tada!
Camera shake is one thing. Blur from Subject movement is quite another. When taking photos in low light there is a point where camera shake becomes irrelevant.
-Matt
Information théory tell us that once some info has been lost, it can't be recovered. If the picture has been somehow "damaged" by some motion blur, the original picture can't be reconstructed.
On the image, we'll have much more than the motion blur from the camera's movement : ...
- noise added from sensor electronic noise
- blur from target movement
- distortion coming from lens defect (mostly for low end cameras)
- distortion/blur from bad focus (autofocus in not perfect)
The operation that will reduce the camera's motion blur will probably increase the effect from all other defects. You reduce one kind of image destruction and increase the impact of the other one.
That's because that's not how "focus follows mouse" should work. You don't move *all* the ui elements over to what the mouse is over. You move the *mouse* ui events over there, and maybe some others, depending on context. Certainly not typing, though.
The biggest, most useful one, IMO, is scroll. I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to scroll a window to view some stuff, but not have that window cover up the one for the app I'm actually working in.
It's doubly frustrating, because when I get home, my mac does exactly what I expect it to...
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
There are some full-size samples of the results of the technique, where you can compare the original image with the result of their technique, and the results of two older techniques. Their technique show some very obvious problems:
There are several examples in the link that seem to be like that. The technique doesn't seem to figure this out in all cases, and renders the two ghost lines as separate, sharp lines. Most obvious example: the edge of the front rim of the red car in the second photo. Though compare with the result they got in the photo of the Coca-Cola cans, where it did figure it out for the rack, but not for the text on the cans, and where it introduced some artifact lines perpendicular to the rack.
The more instructive comparison is the results of these guys' techniques with the older techniques. Clearly, they're doing a lot better than the older techniques. Still, this is very far away from primetime, IMO.
Are you adequate?
MS Windows with support for multiple monitors is available so the old gimp interface should be starting to make sense to people by now, even if you don't have multiple virtual workspaces.
Shouldn't you be using a full screen emacs or vim text editor anyways?
Microsoft Research puts out a lot of really interesting and successful research. They aren't the people programming the OS or office applications.
Yes, but I just took two of the images, for research purposes, and applied a simple Sharp mask to them (two different levels), and it seems the results are pretty comparable. If I actually spent more than 2 mouse clicks to try to properly sharpen them, I betcha the results would be even better, and not require additional hardware. As a matter of fact, the results they get can easily be duplicated with IN CAMERA filters and thus save a boatload of dev costs, and a bunch of money.
These (SHARP 1 and SHARP 2) were done using PMView from the blurry image. Filters -> Sharpen (mild) and Sharpen (moderate). Adding "Edge Enhance" to it makes the car one look even better. Now, these are very very very very basic filters that have been surpassed ages ago by filters easily runnable on a camera or cell phone.
So, I find nothing interesting or successful about this. I find this will be something that makes cameras and cell phones cost more money, while not providing any benefits that a simple filter or two in the cam/phone can accomplish.
deBlur and Sharpen
Sorry about the scrolling... but just something quick I threw together in 2 seconds which does the job). MS, if you want the research comparison taken down, email me at first name dot last name at google dot com.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
Yeah, Microsoft does some decent research and develops some interesting technologies. It's turning things into products that they seem to have trouble with.
What about combining the accelerometer data with a setting that records low-light images is a series of high-speed, underexposed images, then just using to accelerometer data to merge them?
Probably only half-working coming from microsoft, plus if you use black light in the room you can get brick you're phone/camera.
And then, four years later, we get an Open Source carbon-copy of it that works a little better but is much harder to use.
Tee hee giggle snort. Ignorant stereotypes about an organization are funny.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
You don't use a mouse in a text editor.
Something to deblur all that japanese porn I have laying around...
Actually, focus-follows-mouse does exactly what I want, which is to send the keyboard focus to the window under the mouse. What is irritating is "any click raises" or "focus raises" which has slowly infected X windows desktops as naive programmers have infiltrated the OSS desktop space.
I have GNOME configured to do most of what I want, but it causes some OSS apps to freak out once in a while. I can click buttons, drag scrollbars, and type into windows without raising them. I can click on their border or title bar to raise or lower them. And focus follows the mouse "sloppily" so it goes to each app window I enter, but remains with the last window if I merely push the mouse over the root window.
A similarly aggravating bug is modal windows in far too many places, and their more evil cousin the modal window that tries to grab the inputs so you cannot even escape to other apps.
(1) Scrolling going to the focused window instead of the window/element the mouse is hovering over is only default in Windows (and probably some less common *nix WMs I've never used). (2) Most window managers have an option to make focus and raise separate operations. For example, XFCE has an option to focus when you click anywhere on a window, but only raise it if you click on the title bar. Personally, I don't like this and instead use the "always below other windows" and "always on top" options when I want a window ordering that conflicts with my window focus.
I've really got to wonder what you're doing with your Windows install... Yes, we can bash Microsoft all we want, but I and several friends have had 7 for a year and more and we've never experienced anything so serious it'd require a reformat to fix.
I'm content with using 7 and dual-booting to Ubuntu or Fedora when needed.
Here's a dumb question...
If you just need some shaking data to unblur very nicely, why can't one just (offline, with a hour or two to crank on it) just figure out what the motion was by unblurring as hypothesis testing, perhaps on a small section of the picture. Then you unblur the whole thing on the most likely candidates?
Yes, conserving battery power.
Probably someone should point out that on many unixy systems, the mouse pointer disappears after a few moments of not moving it, and/or typing, which also would solve the original poster's problem of wanting to move the mouse off-window to get rid of the pointer.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
To be honest, the MS UNBLUR images are clearly better thant SHARP 1 and SHARP 2, at least for me. Their method allows the software to user more data than any post-processing filter, data that will not be preserved in the image itself. For some people, unless if it adds a substantial fee to a phone or small cam, it is a benefit that cannot be replaced by a simple filter.
Actually, the product teams and research teams often work together - regularly and very deliberately. Many developers have moved between the research and product groups. There are many features in Office, Windows, Bing and other products that came right out of MS Research. In my experience, we're really good at this.
-Foredecker
Jibe!
Taking the next shot maybe?
. If another OSS project gets named after a disability, I'm sure the gimp devs will incorporate it somehow.
I guess they haven't heard about my OSS project, TARD, yet.
This ain't rocket surgery.
In Canon parlance, ultrasonic or USM has nothing to do with image stabilization, but refers to the motor function that drives autofocus.
Image stabilization is marked by a logo that says "Image Stabilization", or "IS".
Does it run on HURD?
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
If you don't like the GUI, there's always the Lisp interface. If another OSS project gets named after a disability, I'm sure the gimp devs will incorporate it somehow.
Then they will no doubt be adding support for the Great Internet Mersenne Primes Search
I think the problem with any method that doesn't change the optical path or move the sensor is that it just can't deal with parallax.
So, your accelerometer records that between the first and the second microexposure, the camera shifted by x amount to the left. What relative shift do you apply to the frames? Well, the problem is that the correct shift is different for objects at different distances--so as soon as you have an image with large depth of field, there is no solution that corrects the blur for all objects in the frame. It might still be useful, though, because you'd be able to reduce camera blur at one distance--e.g., the camera could assume that the correct distance is the focus distance, or if you used RAW processing, you might be able to choose the correction distance at processing time.
Note that optical stabilization systems don't have this problem to the same degree, because they're designed to keep the same ray of light hitting the same pixel during the whole exposure.
There are other complications, though, because each of the microexposures will have more noise and reduced dynamic range compared to the full conventional exposure. I.e., by spending less time recording the value of a pixel, a microexposure is correspondingly less able to finely discriminate its level, and more so when the pixel is dark. Combining the microexposures has the potential to average out the noise, thus gaining you more shadow detail and dynamic range; theoretically you can get the same dynamic range and noise floor as the conventional exposure, but in practice it might well be different. There's a problem, however, that if the sensor noise is not random, the accelerometric shifts you apply to the microexposures as you combine them runs the risk of producing noise artifacts, as the pattern of the noise might produce interference patterns when superimposed on shifted copies of itself (see moiré, or more generally, interference). That's because, to put it briefly, camera motion moves the apparent position of the objects in the frame, but doesn't move the noise patterns.
Yeah, this stuff is complicated.
Are you adequate?
>> They aren't the people programming the OS or office applications.
> No, those guys are busy running mac and linux software looking for stuff to rip off... I mean, sitting around coming up with amazing innovations.
So....same old Microsoft?
To be honest, the MS UNBLUR images are clearly better thant SHARP 1 and SHARP 2, at least for me. Their method allows the software to user more data than any post-processing filter, data that will not be preserved in the image itself. For some people, unless if it adds a substantial fee to a phone or small cam, it is a benefit that cannot be replaced by a simple filter.
While their method allows it, it doesnt yet fully utilize it. There are things about both the filtered images and theirs that is not desirable. Theirs does a little better with contrasting blur (look at the bright spot on the car door - doubled in the sharp (filter) image (and original). But then again, their method currently adds ghosting (in some cases serious ghosting) to the image. Look at the cars in the parking lot and you will notice an "aura" around them.
Both methods equally have issues. But then again, I also did no edge enhance, no smart filter, no nothing special. I am sure I could have gotten better results (than theirs) by firing up some real filters on the original image - all stuff still accomplishable in camera.
That aside, anyone (that I've ever known) who uses such a camera, will either use a tripod for shots that need to be steady, or some other suitable rig, or be capable of holding a camera steady.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
At the annual SIGGRAPH show, Microsoft Research showed new technology that can remove the blur from images on your camera or phone using on-board sensors -- the same sensors currently added to the iPhone 4. No more blurry low light photos!
Uh, what? No more blurry low light photos... if you can get your Apple phone to work with Microsoft technology!
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
No deblurred porn for you
...for my bukake library!
The summary doesn't make clear that this is a way to correct for motion blur, when the camera moved during the exposure. It won't deal with poorly focused images. For that something like the GIMP's Refocus plugin can help. It's a pity that the motion of the camera needs to be recorded - it can't be inferred from the blur of the photograph. So this software would only help once manufacturers include motion sensors in their camera and a way to record the information in the image file. (Though, as noted, many mobile phones do include such sensors.)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I'm not quite sure what's happened. I do a lot with this machine, as it's my primary machine. I have Windows 7 Home Premium on my laptop. In about 6 months of owning it, it had one similar problem that the repair took care of. For some reason this one took me into checkdisk, found errors, fixed them, and rebooted. It was an endless cycle. S.M.A.R.T. doesn't report any drive errors, and Linux is on another partition on the same drive and doesn't have any problems. The machine is nice and cool and stable.
There was a problem with the nVidia driver for the video card under Windows 7. It's a known bug, with no resolution (unfortunately), which would cause the machine to just hang. Unfortunately, the one game I wanted to play needs the nVidia card. The game has known faults trying to use it on an ATI card. {sigh} I'm guessing it didn't like the spontaneous reboots.
Now, I just don't try to play. I don't need any game that bad. :) Maybe someday I'll play it again, when nVidia finally figures out their bug. It seems silly to have two different 1GB DDR3 PCI-E cards here, and can only use one. Eventually the nVidia card will find it's way into a new machine, and I'm running happily on the ATI card under Linux. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
GIMP UI is already totally usable without FVWM or "Focus-follows-cursoer" featured WM.
You do not need active window to be able click the buttons!
All what you just need to do is to use GIMP. No fancy features needed at all.
And the current UI is far superior to what they are planning for 2.8. Do you know why PS is so bad? Because you need all kind fancy functions to UI to allow you hide toolpanel, sidepanels and menus just to get the IMAGE itself being shown what you are editing. Unless you want to tap the TAB all the time (what works as well in GIMP).
Too many say GIMP UI is terrible. But I bet they have not used it every day for working so they can not understand what it is the cleverity in the whole stuff.
GIMP UI is as well more possible to tweak than the PS UI. If you really are a need for quick editings, GIMP UI is the way to go. + GIMP UI supports virtual desktops, presentation and grid views and all fancy powerfull WM tricks (tabbed windowmanager etc) where PS UI does not at all.
PS is trying to be a own desktop environment while GIMP is attaching to existing one.
Blind deconvolution and computational photography have been around for a long time. They are being used, for example, to enhance astronomical images.
Microsoft is making an incremental improvement to this field. That's nice, but why is it worth reporting any more than any of the other papers on this field?
What they have actually used is the fact that motion blur is not normal blur since normal blur would most definitely result in information loss. Apparently motion blur can be counteracted with the extra "motion" information. Now, all I wonder, how hard would it be to brute force that information that the extra camera sensors record. In many cases, I bet that in many cases, the direction wont have time to change during the short exposure, which could limit the number of directions to one. Now all you need is to go trough all of those directions and acceleration combinations and use an algorithm that approximates the resulting pictures sharpness, right?
>Windows 7 crashed yet again, with the only solution being "format and reinstall". Bah, I just did that a month before.
I'm a raging mac zealot and even I can tell you're full of shit.
They've been doing absurd levels of deblurring on CSI for years.
I'm pretty sure they took a clear photo, and blurred it with their custom software to look like an unsteady hand, and then, knowing how it was blurred, their un-blurring algorithm worked great... show me some real-world examples of photos you didn't take.
To avoid additive errors due to summing up wrong pixels in the movement good cameras instead sum up a load of very short shutter-time photos where movement is smaller than the pixels. This gives even better results than post-correcting for the movement as it allows the imagedata to be shifted before summing to remove the summing-error alltogether.
Anyway, the real innovation here is suggesting that one should use already present onboard sensors to try and post-process away movement induced blur. It's a good idea but not a eureka moment. Wouldn't be surprised if they patent the heck out of it anyway.
GIMP hasn't REALLY changed since it came out. In particular, a ton of users have been begging them to create an MDI interface, and they still haven't. It's in 2.7 apparently, but looks more like a big backdrop window with normal windows on top (not the docking toolbars that most people would expect).
GIMP is good enough, but don't pretend it's a perfect app, responsive to users' needs. It's just the best of a bad bunch.
Deconvolution, particularly the fancier kinds, is pretty processor intensive. It's quite possible taking a photo on your smart phone and processing it this way would have a significant hit on your battery (as in, you only take a few of these before needing a recharge) and might take long enough that you don't bother taking more than one photo for the evening.
Robert M, I admire that you have put your thoughts out there and gone to the effort of showing your work. Thanks.
But, honestly. There is simply no comparison between what the MS de-blurr does and what a simple sharpening filter can do. And looking by looking at the images it's totally obvious (at least to anyone who has a threshold level of photography or image processing experience.) The MS de-blurr technique is a starting point for improving the original image capture intent, not an end point. The MS de-blurr technique enhances the amount of information captured instead of degrading poorly captured information. It can be processed further by *proper* post processing image enhancement techniques and get to a much better result than what you have done with a simple Sharpen filter.
In other words, run those sharpen filters on the MS de-blurred images to see a better comparison (although the filters you used are actually not a good choice to enhance the image.)
Don't think of this technique as a replacement for a tripod or proper image capture. Rather think of it as an additional free improvement to all the other techniques.
The really cool thing about the MS de-blurr technique is that it can use onboard hardware "for free" (at least for many smart phones) to improve image capture with little effort. It could be used to great effect with any camera (with adaptation, depending on additional hardware used) DSLR, point and shoots, etc., especially if it can be run on the raw data before processing into JPEG or TIFF. If the process is computationally too intensive, it can still be used very effectively in post processing if the image is captured RAW.
Sign me up.
-- My apologies if the above facts contain any opinions, or vice versa! --
This tech is still unproven: they need to try it on new phone models--cause for some reason, every new phone spied that comes out is always burry.
TFA says they tested with an SLR; cameraphones could *really* use this, as the quality is low enough already (at least mine is.)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Even calculators have had ADD for decades....
The manual for my `Cannon digital IXUS 860IS' has this to say regarding blurred images. Does this mean Cannon owes MS revenue for using its patented anti-blurring technology?
"The image stabilizer function allows you to minimize the camera shake effect (blurred images) when you shoot distant subjects that have been magnified or when you shoot in dark conditions without a flash"
Microsoft looks to have come up with a Rube Goldberg version of Pentax' elegant "Shake Reduction" SR system that's been in their DSLR bodies for years.
http://photography.suite101.com/article.cfm/pentax_dslr_shake_reduction
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
Galaxy S can do it too cause it has 6 axis motion sensing , please add it to your article...
http://www.handheldusers.com/forum/t7232.html
or
http://android.hdblog.it/2010/07/20/galaxy-s-sensore-di-movimento-a-6-assi-facciamo-chiarezza/
Just so everyone knows: this isn't a new technique. It is called Optical image stabilization. It is common in digital cameras. The novelty is doing it on a camera that wasn't intended for this, like the iPhone.
boudoir photography ?