Can point light trails in a shaky night photo be used to estimate blur and deblur the image?
Asked 2/26/2019
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In night photos affected by camera shake, small bright lights or stars can leave short trails that seem to show the camera’s motion path. Since deblurring methods often rely on estimating a blur function (point spread function), can those visible light trails be used in practice to derive the shake pattern and improve the image? Is there consumer software that can do this automatically, rather than requiring custom MATLAB-style processing?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
7y ago
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Yes, this precisely what Photoshop CC's Shake Reduction filter does. Adobe first publicly demonstrated their prototype feature at Adobe Max 2011. The crowd was pretty wowed by the demo. While it was demonstrated in 2011, Piccure actually introduced the feature before Adobe in 2013, as a plugin to Photoshop.
See also: Adobe's help page for the Shake Reduction filter.
One of the better techniques to do this falls under the umbrella term of adaptive deconvolution. An example algorithm is described in the following paper (free to access under CC Attribution license), with interesting result images:
- Hsin-Che Tsai and Jiunn-Lin Wu, “An Improved Adaptive Deconvolution Algorithm for Single Image Deblurring,” Mathematical Problems in Engineering, vol. 2014, Article ID 658915, 11 pages, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1155/2014/658915.
The tool SmartDeblur uses blind deconvolution, which is a less sophisticated technique to attempt to identify the blur function and remove the blur. It works well enough for some simple cases, but tends to have very visible and undesirable artifacts, such as "halo" ringing.
Originally by user11924. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user11924
7y ago
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Yes—this is a real deblurring approach. Bright point sources or small light trails can help estimate the camera’s motion blur, which is essentially the blur function (point spread function) needed for deconvolution.
In practice, this falls under adaptive deconvolution / motion deblurring. Consumer software has used this idea: Adobe’s Photoshop CC includes a Shake Reduction filter designed to estimate and reduce camera shake from a single image. Piccure also offered similar shake-removal as a Photoshop plugin.
That said, results depend on the image. A clear isolated point light can be a useful clue, but deblurring is rarely perfect because blur may vary across the frame, highlights can bloom, and noise or clipping can distort the true motion path. So yes, the light shape can be used to estimate shake, and software exists to do it, but the improvement is situational rather than guaranteed.
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