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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!"
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.
Have you used GIMP in past 5 years?
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
This isn't for people who want to learn photography and take good pictures, it's for people who are shooting their friends in a bar at night to post on Your Face in a Tube and laugh about for a week before being forgotten -- it's merely intended to allow point-and-click shooting work more reliably in poor conditions on cheap equipment with inattentive and untrained operators.
That would be a great point if it involved learning something more complicated than bracing your hand.
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.
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?
Yeah, Microsoft does some decent research and develops some interesting technologies. It's turning things into products that they seem to have trouble with.
But they are adding information to the system with the additional hardware attachment with all the gyroscopes and so-on. This information can be used to improve the photo, correcting some of the damage. So information wasn't "lost"'; it was just reacquired from a different source, as it were.
It looks like camera shake blur would be reduced, but target motion blur would remain intact.
Of course, if you do a 90-second exposure of the sun, it's likely going to be all-white no matter how much shake-correction occurs. But this solution wasn't meant to fix that problem.