Microsoft is creating a camera that will take the blurry out of our bad pics

Blurry photo cleaned up (before and after)

Someone had to invent it – a computer gizmo that takes the blur out of all those pictures. Microsoft labs has done it.

The camera uses a “combination of inexpensive gyroscopes and accelerometers in an energy optimization framework to estimate a blur function from the camera’s acceleration and angular velocity during an exposure.” Got that?

Who cares how it works. It just seems to do the trick on modest blurring, up to 100 pixels.

For the technically adept, here is there explanation. For the rest of just just skip to the examples below and wait for the feature to be commercially available. Don’t stare too long at the animated before and after pictures: it makes your eyes go wonky.

“We solve for the camera motion at a high sampling rate during an exposure and infer the latent image using a joint optimization. Our method is completely automatic, handles per-pixel, spatially-varying blur, and out-performs the current leading image-based methods. Our experiments show that it handles large kernels – up to at least 100 pixels, with a typical size of 30 pixels. We also present a method to perform “ground-truth” measurements of camera motion blur. We use this method to validate our hardware and deconvolution approach. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that uses 6 DOF inertial sensors for dense, per-pixel spatially-varying image deblurring and the first work to gather dense ground-truth measurements for camera-shake blur.”