Slashdot Mirror
Adobe Demos Photo Unblurring At MAX 2011
karthikmns writes with word of an amazing demo presented last week at Adobe's annual MAX convention. You'll have to watch the video, but the enthusiastic crowd reaction seems genuine (or at least justified), even in an audience full of Photoshop enthusiasts, as photographs are algorithmically deblurred. (Maybe in the future, cameras will keep records of their own motion in metadata to assist such software efforts, rather than relying on in-built anti-shake software.) No word about when this will turn up for consumers in anything besides demo form, but I suspect similar software's already in use at Ft. Meade and Langley.
This does NOT fix images that are out of focus. This fixes motion blur. The two are entirely unrelated.
Except that both are examples of convolution and deconvolution. In motion blur, the convolution kernel resembles a straight line in the direction of motion. In unfocused images, the kernel has circular symmetry. I used to write simple deconvolution algorithms about 10 years ago, but only for motion blur, where the kernel was easy to find from the conditions in a well-defined industrial setting. Unfocused images are harder to deal with, because the convolution kernel goes to zero at certain intervals, so information is destroyed.
As mentioned in my other post, here are some examples of more sophisticated image reconstruction from many years ago. When the kernel is unknown, the image can still be reconstructed using statistical techniques (basically because the kernel is the same for all points in the image).
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.