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Remember all those movies and TV shows in which the Feds turned a completely blurred photo into a focused image by clicking one button? Remember how you sneered? Well, soon you won’t be able to laugh at it anymore. This app lets you deblur any heavily blurred image just like that.
Even while imperfect, the results are truly astonishing.
Created by Vladimir Yuzhikov — a software engineer specialised in image and signal processing — the SmartDeblur app is truly impressive. According to him, the “restoration of distorted images is one of the most interesting and important problems of image processing — from the theoretical, as well as from the practical point of view.” Even while the math for doing it started to develop about 70s years ago, he says, it’s only now that we are seeing the results of it.
Yuzhikov worked on two common cases: blurring due to incorrect focus and blurring due to movement. “Each of you knows very well,” he points out, they “are very difficult to repair.” In fact, the examples used as samples by Yuzhikov are impossible to fix using current commercial technology.
He started his work with his own picture of Venice. First he applied a synthetic blurring filter on it, and then he applied his software on it. It worked, as you can see above. And while it didn’t revert to its original state, the results were impressive.
Many people think that blurring is an irreversible operation and the information in this case is lost for good, because each pixel turns into a spot, everything mixes up, and in case of a big blur radius we will get a flat colour all over the image. But it is not quite true — all the information just becomes redistributed in accordance with some rules and can be definitely restored with certain assumptions.
But, of course, artificially blurred images are not the real problem. The real problem is real world fuzzy images caused by poor lens focusing or unwanted motion blur. The results, however, were not as perfect but equally impressive.
Take a look at his examples:
Example of blurred image because of poor focus:
Taken with a Canon 500D camera using manual focus.
Yuzhikov’s app result:
Example of blurred image because of motion:
Yuzhikov’s app result:
Example of out of focus image of text (left) and fixed image (right)
The program
While the images have artefacts, it’s quite amazing to see the level of detail that Yuzhikov’s program can obtain from these blurred images, like window panes on windows that were just muddy spots. I’m sure that we will soon see this and much better focusing filters in future software. And with the computational power of smartphones increasing by the day — especially their graphic processing units, which are ideal for the math required in this — it will not be surprised to see this feature built in the camera software of future iOS, Android and Windows phones.
You can here download and try it (sadly, it’s Windows-only now). [Yuzhikov — Thanks Ángel Jiménez!]
Makes is worse in fact. Looks like hell for someone suffering from Cataracts to going on a trip (drug-induced).
Jack Bauer would not be pleased if you tried to pull this shit at 03:00 when he’s 19 hours into a terrorist hunt.
I just tried it and it didn’t do shit for some minor motion blur.
I call total bullshit on the picture at the top
Well, it’s easy to call BS when it’s Jesus Diaz.
I downloaded the picture at the top, and the blurred text image, and did actually manage to clean it up pretty good with the program, but it wasn’t as good as the one up there. Maybe the original was much higher resolution.
But yeah the motion blur feature pretty much sucks.
It amuses me how everyone on the US site is instantly bumming it without actually trying it. The out of focus blur “fix” seems pretty good, but I’m not sure it’s any better than what we already have. Also “fix” is a strong word.
In other words, I think this is interesting but people who don’t know anything about image processing are quickly declaring this the greatest scientific discovery of our time (on the Giz US site!)
I’m sorry, but that second (motion blur) example is bogus – completely different photos. The original clearly has snow in it, and the fixed example clearly does not (apart from the fact it’s a different crop, too). In fact, cropping aside, it looks the same as the “result” pic from the first example.
(should really say that the second pic has MORE snow in it as they both do have some)
He’s cut the bottom off because obviously the “fixed” photo completely messes up the ground. It looks like the snow has been replaced by black in the little bit you can see.
You know what, I think the second “fixed” photo IS the same as the first “fixed” photo. The snow doesn’t match.
Also, the motion blurred image should contain a lot more info than the blurry one of those flats. You can tell. Yet the “fixed” motion blur image sucks.
My conclusion based off this and testing it myself is that the motion blur fixing in this program is terrible but the de-blur is interesting
i typed blurry into google images and downloaded a few out of focus images,from small to large, and not one of them was improved. most my subjects were people or ornate objects, i am wondering if this only really works with pictures with straight lines in them
I tried to deblur some random photos off the internet without luck. The only things I’ve gotten interesting results from are the top image from the original site, and the text one below it.
It basically only works for a very specific kind of blur, and even then the system isn’t automated, you have to play around with the parameters
don’t think Abby from NCIS will be using this anytime soon
No, not likely. I love Jesus’s sensational coverage of this program though.
INCREDIBLE CSI-LIKE ENHANCE TECHNOLOGY FIXES UNFOCUSED PHOTOS!
He’s such a fucking tool
What’s the difference between this and Adobe’s version?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxjiQoTp864#!
Adobe’s come a long way with their filters already though. Especially with their Photobomb tool:
http://youtu.be/zmpt4T8Hyic
hahaha like that lol
I’m on a Mac so I can’t try it but I’m wondering about the text test image, has anyone tried recreating that one? I’m wondering how useful it could be if they incorporated this into a phone app, for taking readable shots of documents. I know there are apps for this already but I’ve had mixed success with them.
Like everyone else, I couldn’t get this application well on any photo I gave it. I obtained much better results just using the sharpening & noise tools in Photoshop!
Yep, this program doesn’t seem to work as well as the example images.
You would have expected Diaz to at least try out the program before raving about it
Science, you are excellent.