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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!"
Enhance!
Microsoft Research puts out a lot of really interesting and successful research. They aren't the people programming the OS or office applications.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.