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

Re:Enhance

[blackest_k]

Ok it's rather silly to try and get more out of say a 640 x 480 picture, if that is the resolution of the image.

  Although years ago i used a hand scanner to scan a scratched photo initially the scan was black or white pixels and you could see patterns at that level and continue them into the scratched area's and restore the picture. Before the scanner software took the black and white pixels and converted to gray scale.

Ocr can work quite well figuring out what the scanned text is it has a limited number of possible letters and numbers plus generally these are grouped into words which helps produce a successful guess.

sometimes you can filter out dust and other noise which helps enhance the detail by removing the distractions.

Now lets examine 35mm film it can contain far more detail than you would normally see on a typical print. The information is in the image but it is too small to be seen at the resolution that is being viewed at. It is there and it was captured.

With digital photography modern camera's are capturing at 4000x3000 pixels and we can be viewing at 400x300 which makes each visible pixel an average of 10 x 10 around it. However zooming in will reveal detail which is normally lost. I have a projector which currently gives a 2.5 meter wide picture. connected to my netbook i can see detail that I wasn't aware of when I took the picture and I can zoom and pan about just like in blade runner.

Video capture is more limited since the resolution is down to 640*480 on my camera but digital movie cameras are capturing at 4000x3000 which will have a lot of information lost to the general public. Presumably the film studio can still view the tiny details. I can't since the information has been lost in the dvd or blueray copy.

The other trouble with digital is the camera generally compresses the images meaning the data which was captured has already been thrown out.

This is one good reason to keep shooting 35mm or larger film formats because there really can be details which can be enhanced. It's a little more expensive than digital per picture but its never been cheaper to shoot with an SLR. You don't have to buy prints and you can scan your own negatives or positives and bring out detail that you wouldn't have from a digital camera.

Worth considering getting your own darkroom equipment too. Hopefully there will be enough people to keep some of the film and paper companies producing because film is still better than digital when it comes to image quality.