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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.
I'd be able to see the demo!
How hard can it be, I mean, they've been doing it in movies since at least the 80s. Hell even the $500 dell desktop on CSI:miami can do it.
"we've got a convenience store video feed of the getaway car, the camera was recording in 480i from 300 yards away"
"can you sharpen it up a little?"
"sure. one moment... ok got it. License plate is california JGL-711. Ok just a bit more... yeah, looks like registration expires march 2012. Wait, let me clean it up some more, yeah it looks like there's a small identifying scratch on the trunk lid about a half inch long shaped like a boomerang. Oh wait, this is the new version of the software, let me zoom in a bit further, yeah I'm pretty sure I'm seeing loose skin cells on the edge of the trunk lid, maybe our missing person is in the trunk!"
"good work, now where's my sunglasses?"
yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaahhhh!
I think it would be better to say that [most of] the data are already present; the data just happen to be initially in an unwanted form.
No, and really no to everyone else. This is making _obfuscated_ data suddenly because visible.
It characterizes the the motion of the camera from the blur then reverses it: essentially an image stabilization algorithm. It's like making voices audible over loud music by figuring out what the song is and subtracting it from the mix.
It's cool, but not magic. They aren't even pretending to add in missing data like a CSI zoom. Nor does it even seem to take care of simple out of focus situations. So let's not get too excited, well, unless you've got a cheap/slow camera.
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.