Adobe Demos Photo Unblurring At MAX 2011 251
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by
timothy
from the 174-days-early dept.
from the 174-days-early dept.
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:Interpolated missing data is still just a ficti (Score:4, Insightful)
Did you watch the video? It makes unreadable text readable. That falls into the category of making missing data suddenly appear.
Re:Interpolated missing data is still just a ficti (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
A fiction our brain naturally employs anyway. (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not entirely about whether a digitally de-blurred image is more accurate than an inherently sharp image.
It's also about whether the sensory impression made on a human by a digitally de-blurred image is a more accurate a model of the reality than the sensory impressions made by a blurred image. Of course your occipital lobes do plenty of interpolating of their own, so surely the question becomes which system (digital or organic) produces the more reliable interpolations.
Maybe if a person studied the blurred picture long enough they could have reconstructed that telephone number, hard to say from the mediocre quality video of a small display window.
I certainly wouldn't discount software being able to outperform even a trained person in sufficiently narrow fields, and I doubt you would either.
Re:Interpolated missing data is still just a ficti (Score:5, Insightful)
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.