Microsoft is moving into the digital camera market with new software that “deblurs” images.
According to several sources the US software Company is experminenting with a third-party DSLR camera and its own “deblurring” attachment that will remove the blurriness in an image after it’s taken.
Electronista reported that the attachment uses input from inertial sensors to measure the camera shake and remove it from the original photograph by using its “aided blind-deconvolution” algorithm. The six degrees of freedom gyroscopes and accelerometers estimate a blur function from the camera’s acceleration and angular velocity when an exposure is taking place.
The fixed image is a joint optimization of the original and Microsoft-corrected one. The process is automatic and works on each pixel. It’s also said to perform better than competing image-based methods. It can handle kernels up to 100 pixels, with 30 a typical size. The approach uses Bluetooth, but whether this is to communicate with the camera or act as a control interface is not clear.
The technology could be applied to cameras and potentially camera phones, if scaled down small enough, but Microsoft has not given an indication of when this could be put into production.
