Adobe Working on Cool Deblurring Tools for Both Video and Image

ProDesignTools

Last week we got a sneak peek of a great feature that is likely to be in the next release of Photoshop: a new Camera Shake Reduction Tool, which was previously known as Photoshop Image Deblurring… We expect more details to be revealed about this and other new features in a possible CS7 announcement on May 6th.

But accomplishing this for still images isn’t the only cool deblurring application Adobe has been working on lately… Adobe researchers Jue Wang and Sunghyun Cho have published a paper on an innova­tive new technique to deblur videos as well – which could be huge considering how much handheld video footage is out there now, and growing every day. The develop­ment of this technology could be a big addition to video editing tools like Adobe’s Premiere Pro.

Here’s their summary:

Videos captured by hand-held cameras often contain significant camera shake, causing many frames to be blurry. Restoring shaky videos not only requires smoothing the camera motion and stabilizing the content, but also demands removing blur from video frames. However, video blur is hard to remove using existing single or multiple image deblurring techniques, as the blur kernel is both spatially and temporally varying.

This paper presents a video deblurring method that can effectively restore sharp frames from blurry ones caused by camera shake. Our method is built upon the observation that due to the nature of camera shakes, not all video frames are equally blurry. The same object may appear sharp on some frames while blurry on others. Our method detects sharp regions in the video, and uses them to restore blurry regions of the same content in nearby frames. Our method also ensures that the deblurred frames are both spatially and temporally coherent using patch-based synthesis. Experimental results show that our method can effectively remove complex video blur under the presence of moving objects and other outliers, which cannot be achieved using previous deconvolution-based approaches.

Now, will we see this technology part of the upcoming release of Creative Suite or the Creative Cloud? It’s hard to say for sure from what’s been presented, but if things goes like they did for Image Deblurring, then we may see a sneak peek presented at Adobe MAX and then hopefully incorporated into Premiere in a future version. read more...