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Adobe publishes video of proposed image deblur function

Oct 17, 2011 at 18:12:19 GMT

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Adobe has released videos from its AdobeMAX event, including coverage of the image deblur feature for removing camera shake that has generated so much excitement. The company's video shows feature in much better detail than the audience-shot version currently on the web. Shown as a prototype of a technology that is being considered for future versions of Photoshop, the function analyses the movement of the camera during an exposure and then corrects for it. Videos are also available for the other projects demonstrated at the show, but it's the image deblur clip that is likely to really interest photographers.

Press Release:

Media Alert: Adobe Posts New “Sneak Peek” Videos

Photoshop “Unblur” Technology Stuns Crowd at Recent Adobe MAX Event

London, UK — Oct. 17, 2011 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today posted videos of the technology “sneak peeks” that were showcased recently at the company’s annual MAX user conference in Los Angeles. Included in the videos is the image deblurring technology, demonstrated in an on-stage demo by Adobe senior research scientist Jue Wang, which has become an Internet sensation.

"We sneaked some early-stage technology from our labs during the recent Adobe MAX conference that exemplify the kind of technology innovation that is thriving across Adobe," said Kevin Lynch, chief technology officer, Adobe. "Adobe's technology leadership is ensuring that designers and developers have the tools they need to help shape the future of digital media."

The sneaks are intended to give MAX attendees a look at future technologies. These technologies may, or may not, make it into future versions of Adobe products. The demos are currently being hosted on AdobeTV, and include:

Image Deblurring – removing blurriness from digital photos caused by camera shake while the pictures were being taken;
Local Layer Ordering – a new way for graphic designers to create layered compositions that better reflect the way real world objects act;
InDesign Liquid Layout – using InDesign to create high quality magazines that automatically adapt layouts across devices and screen orientation;
Near Field Communications in Adobe AIR – using Adobe AIR to create applications that communicate with the physical world;
Automatic Synchronization of Crowd Sourced Videos – synchronising video clips taken with different cameras and from different vantage points into a single immersive video;
Reverse Debugging in Flash Builder – the ability to step backwards in time while debugging a Flash application to better find the root cause of bugs;
RubbaDub – automatically replacing the dialog of a video clip with separately recorded audio with perfect synchronisation;
Pixel Nuggets – searching through a large library of images by identifying images that contain the same people, backgrounds, landmarks, etc.;
Monocle – a new visual tool to help developers find and fix performance problems in Flash applications;
Video Meshes – an entirely new way to edit videos, including the ability to create 3D fly-throughs of 2D videos and change focus and depth of field;
GPU Parallelism – using a device’s graphic processing unit (GPU) to accelerate performance of general purpose computing.

Comments

Total comments: 53

We’ve included an update to the end of the blog post today that explains the standard protocol that our team and other researchers implement to test deblur functionality.
http://blogs.adobe.com/photoshopdotcom/2011/10/behind-all-the-buzz-deblur-sneak-peek.html#comments

0 upvotes

I just can't believe Adobe would jepodise its brand image by being so completely dishonest about the technology. A company I used to trust just fell to zero in respect terms - lying to an audience of over 1 million people who have watched the clip! Any blur created by software is going to be much easier to correct for than real life motion blur - partly becasue you will able to tell photoshop the exact reverse parameters. Come on Adobe, apologise now. Promising software but this is a dishonest way to preview it.

4 upvotes

Interesting read on their blog post. They took out the controversial Kevin Lynch pic. However, after seeing their full size picture of Hollywood and Highland Center (first pic), I am getting more skeptical.

http://blogs.adobe.com/photoshopdotcom/files/2011/10/Plaza-1024x511.png

It is taken under good day light. I would say an hour or two before sunset. How bad do you have to shoot to get a blur pic outdoor under good day light? I suspect it is yet another cheat.

0 upvotes

Maybe technology will progress to a point where, when someone robs a 7-Eleven, you will be able see what they look like.

2 upvotes

Just read a blog post where the engineers talk about the project.
http://blogs.adobe.com/photoshopdotcom/2011/10/behind-all-the-buzz-deblur-sneak-peek.html

0 upvotes

how embarrassing for Adobe, why do people who comment on here not read others comments before posting their own.

its fake guys

Comment edited 2 times, last edit 5 minutes after posting

2 upvotes

I don't understand why are people that excited ... the technology, that Adobe presents now is 5-30 years old. There are only two interesting things - automatic PSF kernel estimation (5 years old and patented), speed of the operation. In this time the deconvolution (or deblurring) is slow and needs good and robust PSF estimation, otherwise it doesn't work. If you once have PSF, here is bunch of software, that can do the job. Btw every deconvolution increases the noise or reduce resolution - there is no way how to prevent it.

1 upvote

End of expensive VR Lenses.........8-))

0 upvotes

try reading the earlier comments

1 upvote

I've been saying this for a many years now (only a few years here on dpreview since that is how long I've been here):

That is, *never* delete your bad shots from disk, and never delete your camera RAW photos.

You never know what people might be able to do with your photos sometime in the future. The deblurring feature that Adobe demonstrated is only a taste, I think that 100 years from now, our grandchildren will be able to do things with photos that are currently unimaginable. We can imagine, if we went back in time to the year 1900 and showed people then what we can do with photos today, they'd be amazed. I'm sure if we had a visitor from 2111, we'd be just as amazed (maybe someday someone from 2111 will read this and respond if I'm right or wrong, I'll try to reply if I can :-).

Comment edited 26 seconds after posting

1 upvote

Here's the technology paper from Siggraph, which should answer a lot of questions below...

http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~yoavhacohen/nrdc/

You need a sharp sample image...

1 upvote

This gives me even more confidence that one day Adobe will be able to re-focus images better than Lytro.

0 upvotes

That's absolutely amazing. I WANT this for Photoshop CS6.

0 upvotes

Out of the other plugins, I can see "RubbaDub" - which replaces video dialogue with a new audio track - being great fun for redubbing news footage of politicians (for example). It would make StSanders' job a lot easier. The crowdsourced video synchronisation plugin sounds a bit creepy, though; imagine using it to track a person's movements with webcams, video footage uploaded to Flickr, etc. You'd be a ghost moving through other people's lives, suddenly trackable.

0 upvotes

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

0 upvotes

I wonder how the deblurring will be affected by noise?

So now you can take a 3Ds, slap on a ~f/1 lens and also add a few more stops of camera shake and still have a decent image with almost no light.

0 upvotes

Did anyone noticed that the Deblurring demonstration uses 3 different "preferences" for the 3 images? They must have spent hours to find the settings that yield perfect result for each photo. Something most people not willing to do. I have heard very similar technology from Microsoft (recording camera shake while taking photo and later use it to compensate the photo). I have to actually use it to believe it.

3 upvotes

well it is a prototype....
An finished product will have more help to the user....

0 upvotes

Still, the hard part (creating the deblur kernel) was done automatically.

1 upvote

The same software could be included built in a camera processing if one assume it is possible to measure the amount of shaking in a hand photo.

2 upvotes

As an inveterate pixel peeper who does most of my corrections at that level I'll be interested in seeing how much debris the process leaves behind. Many auto process plug-ins I've tried leave a lot of artifacts. Compared to the original and useless blurred image it may give something "usable" but perhaps not something appropriate for much enlargement or commercial delivery.

0 upvotes

Nice point. That was my thought (fear) as well. Of course, for a lot of non-pro uses--like viewing an image on the Web--this feature might be amazing, and might save lots of shots that would otherwise be throw-aways.

0 upvotes

Very impressive if they provide a default step for the process. Adobe loves to have the user fish around for features like this.

0 upvotes

Good thing I have most of my photos backed up. However, I probably had deleted just as many thinking they were impossible to recover anything from.

Imagine what we can do with blurry film photos...

Comment edited 3 minutes after posting

0 upvotes

I hope they put it in LR!

3 upvotes

I checked the last picture with Kevin Lynch. I googled the name and find the original picture which is perfectly sharp. They used a mere photoshop motion blur on it. easy to recover (try with focus magic)...

What about blur with all our camera noise?

16 upvotes

Link?

0 upvotes

http://www.flickr.com/photos/15543694@N06/5117266025

18 upvotes

Thanks djec

0 upvotes

djec, I'm impressed. Great detective work!

What a shame, Adobe! Cheating in front of such a large audience.

It is a completely identical picture. I saved a copy of the picture just in case.

2 upvotes

I was going to post and say that I was impressed by their demo. Then I saw djec's post and found that Adobe lied.

Really Adobe, shame on you.

1 upvote

what a fraud
tnx

1 upvote

Now I wonder if they cheated on the first 2 pictures too. Especially the first one (crowd shot). It looks too good to be true.

1 upvote

credit to Durandalfr for noticing originally.

0 upvotes

If you ask me the blurring looks way too clean to be real camera shake, with all three examples. You can 'track' the blurring path with the naked eye way too easily, it's quite clear when you watch this presentation in HD.

0 upvotes

Ha, ha. This is what my wife always says about weight loss photos.They just make the before photo the after photo and vice versa.

1 upvote

Good catch! If it did rotational deblur in addition to translation movement then I would be impressed. Perhaps the "parameters.txt" files Jue Wang uploaded were pointers to the original image..haha

0 upvotes

I contacted Adobe about this and the company has written an update on the Photoshop Blog about it. Well spotted.

http://www.dpreview.com/news/1110/11101813adobeclarifies.asp

0 upvotes

How soon is it going to be, before a smart developer, offers an app for smart phones, and tablets, and cameras too, that would utilise the onboard accelerometers to log the movement of the device during the exposure, to generate the point spread function?
With a decent PSF, deconvolving a motion blurred image should be child play!

2 upvotes

I wonder if this has already been done. I have an app on my Android phone called 'HDR Camera+'. This is, as you'd probably guess, an HDR application that takes three photos at different exposures and 'blends' them together. I've used similar PC apps where you have to align the photos semi-automatically with a bit of manual adjustment. It can be a bit of a fiddle to get it right. HDR Camera+ does it automatically and gets the alignment spot on, at least on samples I've inspected. Perhaps some accelerometer assistance?

0 upvotes

I doubt it. But then again, I'm unfamiliar with the method used to register the images.
An algorithm, used by HDR software applications, is a more likely approach.

Comment edited 9 minutes after posting

0 upvotes

HDR is far from debluring. HDR works with multiple still images and combine them into 1. This is very different from extracting a single still out of a blended image, which a lot of photographer will delete without a second thought.

Has it been done before? I first heard about it here:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/imudeblurring/

0 upvotes

While I need to see and use this function to believe its efficacy, my second thought was to regret the number of images I've discarded in the past as beyond salvation!!

0 upvotes

Hopefully this will work just as well on a very subtle amounts of blur. I would love to go through many of my old raw photos and apply this plugin even if it was just to get rid of the smallest possible blur that might be there.

Comment edited 37 seconds after posting

0 upvotes

I agree. If it can turn an "almost" into a "perfect" I'll be happy.

0 upvotes

I think I will have to see the real thing before I really believe it. These seemed a little too good to be true.
Only time will tell.

1 upvote

Old news.
Amazing technology!

0 upvotes

Wow! If Adobe can make this work in real life as good as it did in the demo then we may never need in-lens or in-body image stabilization ever again.

0 upvotes

I would think getting it correct at the start is the best way for anything, instead of fixing it later.

0 upvotes

True, but I make mistakes, like not having my tripod with me when maybe I should. This would save the day for me, maybe not for everyone.

0 upvotes

Image deblurring is fantastic!

0 upvotes

I saw this a few weeks ago and thought it was pretty impressive, shutter blur has been an issue since the dawn of photography. Now if only Adobe could create an optical deblur plugin that would be the end of it!

Congratulations Adobe!

0 upvotes

well i bet that a sharp original images is always better than having a deblurred image. But it will be able to save some disasters... :p

0 upvotes

Total comments: 53


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