Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
3. PROPOSED APPROACH
(6). In that case, the block is simply not considered for 1.6
After finding the blur value for each block, the mean 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3
Actual Blur Value
of all these values is calculated and is denoted by _init.
Our experiments showed that this mean value does not Fig. 2. Estimated blur versus the actual blur for
directly provide the blur in the image, since it is dependent training images.
of the choice of the trial blur filters. To alleviate this
Mean Value vs. Actual Value of Blur
problem, we propose a learning procedure to find the
proper mapping between this value and the actual blur 2.6
value, under fixed trial blur filters.
Mean value of Blur
2.4
3.3.1 Training Fig. 3. The mean of estimated blur value for the
training images
The training procedure comprises the initial blur
estimation with a set of 50 high resolution training images Now, _mean is considered to be piece-wise linear
under various degrees of artificially-introduced blur, using between two successive values of j and the slope of each
the method described above. Fig. 2 shows the blur section of the line is found using the equation given below.
estimation curves for these images, where the horizontal
axis is the blur radius used in creating a blurred version of
( _ mean j +1 _ mean j )
the original high-resolution image. In our experiments, the _ slope j = (8)
radius of the focal blur induced in the images varies from 0 .1
0.2 to 3 in steps of 0.1. The reason for beginning from 0.2
is that, no matter how good the resolution of the images is, where j = 0.2, 0.3,..., 2.9.
it always has some degree of inherent blur.
This slope will be used in the mapping process. With
Suppose that the initial estimated blur radius is the training procedure, we have a curve that best
denoted by _initij, where i denotes the image number and represents all the training images and a slope for each
j denotes the actual blur, which varies from 0.2 to 3. After section of this curve. The values found in Equations (7)
generating the plots shown in Fig. 2, the next task is to and (8) are stored and is used to map _init to the output
find a single curve that best represents all these curves. value of sigma as described in the next subsection.
Here a simple approach is used, which finds the mean
3.3.2 Mapping initial estimate to the final output 0.3 to 3 in steps of 0.1. Fig. 6 shows the mean of the
absolute estimation error over the test images. The figure
Let _init denote the initial estimated value of the blur in
also shows maximum and minimum value of the
a given image. The first task is to identify the value of j
estimation error for each degree of blur.
such that,
_ mean j < _ init < _ mean j +1 (9) Input Image (I), with the input blur ( ).
_ init _ mean j
_ out = + j (10) Perform initial blur (_init )
_ slope j estimation (Sect. 3.2)
0.9
2.5 Average Error
0.8 Maximum Error
Minimum Error
2 0.7
Output Blur
0.6
1.5
0.5
1
0.4
0.5 0.3
0.2
0
0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3
0.1
Actual Blur
3.4 Testing on a new image Fig. 6. Error in Blur Estimation for testing images.
Given a new input image I, the following steps are From the figure, it is evident that the error in blur
performed to estimate the global blur. First, we find the estimation is independent of the input blur radius unlike
pixel positions on which the blur estimation should rely. algorithms whose performance deteriorates with increase
Second, initial blur estimation is carried out based on in the input blur. It is also found from the plot that the
pixels chosen from the first step. Last, the mapping learnt average error is quite small (only about 0.2 away from the
from the training set is used to correct the initial blur ground truth).
estimate. Fig. 5 summarizes the processing flow. To take a closer look at the performance of the
proposed algorithm, the results of the method are
4. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS illustrated below with three images of different visual
characteristics: a portrait, a close-range shot of an object
The blur estimation algorithm proposed in the previous scene, and an outdoor (long-shot) scene, as illustrated in
section was tested over 40 high-resolution testing images, Fig. 7. (These are named Image 3, 4, and 5, respectively
which are not among the training images. The test images thereafter.) Fig. 8 shows the estimated blur value versus
were blurred artificially using a blur radius varying from the actual blur value for these three images, and Fig. 9
shows the blur estimation error. From these figures it can while the technique proposed here produces an absolute
be concluded that the performance of the proposed blur metric.
algorithm is insensitive to the visual content of the images.