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!"

Comments

Frankencamera.

[Greger47]

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

Re:Enhance

[slasho81]

Don't forget the TVTropes page: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EnhanceButton Sorry.

MicroSoft is impressive at SIGGRAPH

[peter303]

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.

Even so...

[fyngyrz]

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.