Blur kernel estimation using the radon transform

• Published in: CVPR 2011 pp. 241 - 248
• Main Authors: Taeg Sang Cho, Paris, S., Horn, B. K. P., Freeman, W. T.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.06.2011
• Subjects: Cameras; Estimation; Image color analysis; Image edge detection; Kernel; Noise; Transforms
• ISBN: 1457703947; 9781457703942
• ISSN: 1063-6919
• DOI: 10.1109/CVPR.2011.5995479

Camera shake is a common source of degradation in photographs. Restoring blurred pictures is challenging because both the blur kernel and the sharp image are unknown, which makes this problem severely underconstrained. In this work, we estimate camera shake by analyzing edges in the image, effectively constructing the Radon transform of the kernel. Building upon this result, we describe two algorithms for estimating spatially invariant blur kernels. In the first method, we directly invert the transform, which is computationally efficient since it is not necessary to also estimate the latent sharp image. This approach is well suited for scenes with a diversity of edges, such as man-made environments. In the second method, we incorporate the Radon transform within the MAP estimation framework to jointly estimate the kernel and the image. While more expensive, this algorithm performs well on a broader variety of scenes, even when fewer edges can be observed. Our experiments show that our algorithms achieve comparable results to the state of the art in general and produce superior outputs on man-made scenes and photos degraded by a small kernel.