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.

Re:the end.

[eobanb]

This does NOT fix images that are out of focus. This fixes motion blur. The two are entirely unrelated.

Microsoft did it one year ago

[kiwix]

Microsoft did a similar demonstration one year ago [slashdot.org].

Re:Interpolated missing data is still just a ficti

[mrjb]

Unblurring without having any additional information has been done by academic software before using a process called blind deconvolution [nist.gov], look it up for some interesting pictures and videos.

It's a rather "expensive" (cpu-intensive) operation, and indeed having sensor data about how the camera has shaken during exposure would significantly help in restoring the image. Interestingly, even cheap smart phones with crappy cameras will often already have movement sensor on-board, so there are some possibilities to improve image quality right after taking a picture; all it takes is a bit of software. How long until someone here whips up an improved Android camera app?

I'm probably under-informed, but I haven't heard of any cameras with full-blown movement sensor, although I know some of them can work out portrait vs landscape by now. Sounds like camera manufacturers have some catching up to do in the hardware department.