On Wed, 19 Oct 2011 10:38:59 +0100, bugbear

<bugbear_at_trim_papermule.co.uk_trim> wrote:

>Martin Brown wrote:

>>>

>>> "UPDATE: For those who are curious ? some additional background on the

>>> images used during the recent MAX demo of our ?deblur? technology. The

>>> first two images we showed ? the crowd scene and the image of the

>>> poster, were examples of motion blur from camera shake. The image of

>>> Kevin Lynch was synthetically blurred from a sharp image taken from the

>>> web. What do we mean by synthetic blur? A synthetic blur was created by

>>> extracting the camera shake information from another real blurry image

>>> and applying it to the Kevin Lynch image to create a realistic

>>> simulation. This kind of blur is created with our research tool. Because

>>> the camera shake data is real, it is much more complicated than anything

>>> we can simulate using Photoshop?s blur capabilities. When this new image

>>> was loaded as a JPEG into the deblur plug-in, the software has no idea

>>> it was synthetically generated. This is common practice in research and

>>> we used the Kevin example because we wanted it to be entertaining and

>>> relevant to the audience ? Kevin being the star of the Adobe MAX

>>> conference!

>>> For more information and examples on the common practice of synthetic

>>> blurring being used as part of research in this area, check out:

>>> http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/mdf_deblurring/synth_results/index.html

>>>

>>>

>>> http://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~leojia/projects/robust_deblur/

>>> http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~levina/papers/deconvLevinEtalCVPR09.pdf

>>> "

>>

>> It is fair enough to use synthetic blur (and synthetic noise for that

>> matter) *provided* that you make it clear *and* show the results of

>> applying your new algorithm to that synthetic test data to compute a

>> deconvolved image. The reconstruction can then be compared against the

>> known perfect target image - this is standard practice.

>>

>> It is *CHEATING* to show the synthetic blurred image as "Before" and the

>> original perfect master image as "After" which is what they did!

>

>That's not how I read it; I read it that of the 3 "before" images,

>2 had camera shake applied with a camera (!!), and the last

>had camera shake (deduced from a separate image) applied

>to it via software.

>

>I kinda' hope that all the "after" images were made

>from the "before" images, and see nothing to the contrary

>in the text.

The issue I have with it is that in the synthesized case they applied

blur data their software extracted from another image, so the blurring

was thereby limited to modes that their software was able to handle.

Now it would be somewhat interesting if the resulting "after" image

showed that it removed not just the synthetic blur but also some from

the source image, which would be a bit like handling a bad optical

copy of a print, or some such case with more than one blur source.

Otherwise it just shows that it can remove what it can remove, so we

learn nothing.