Tip #40Kinesense LE

How to deblur and upscale an image

Reverse motion, focus or Gaussian blur by modelling the blur kernel, and raise the resolution of an image with superresolution.

Patricia McCabeSoftware Engineer

Having moved into the advanced section last week with histogram edits, The Clarification Chronicles continues this week by looking at the deblur and superresolution options.

Deblur Deblur button

A motion-blurred car rear before and after deblurring, making the licence plate clearer.

DeBlur uses a ‘Fast Fourier Transform’ to reverse certain types of image blur. The key to ‘deblur’ is modelling how the blur happened – did the camera move, and how much and in which direction? This model is called the ‘kernel’ and is shown on the right hand side of the options menu.

The Deblur options for focus, motion and Gaussian blur, with the blur kernel shown on the right.

In the example above the camera moved 10 pixels at an angle of -45 degrees, causing motion blur. The resulting kernel can be seen on the right. The software uses this kernal to undo the blur mathematically. Focus and Gaussian options are different modes of non-moving blur. ‘Focus’ uses a ‘flat’ kernel while Gaussian has more weighting (i.e. importance) for the central part of the kernel.

Deblur needs high resolution images to work. Poor quality CCTV or video that has been heavily compressed usually can’t be recovered.

Superresolution Superresolution button

A licence plate reading 127-RFS before and after superresolution.

Superresolution is used to enhance the resolution of an image.

The Superresolution options: source image size, enlarge percentage and result image size.

The enlarge settings in options set by what percentage you want to increase the resolution of the image. Above you can see the original resolution of the image where below shows the resulting image resolution.

A small crop of the letters RFS enlarged with superresolution.

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