The attached is (a crop of) a picture of a co-worker's failed attempt to "get away from it all" by going for a shopping weekend to New York, only to find a giant illuminated billboard of our product directly opposite her hotel. Unfortunately she was so traumatised that the picture has severe camera shake. Now the left and right arrows on the leftmost picture of the Vibez are nearly point sources, so the little quadrants they appear as, depict the convolution function of the whole image. So the question is, is there any software out there that can observe (or even derive) that convolution function and deconvolve the picture, restoring focus?

Back when I was a student there was this technique called "maximum entropy" which essentially iteratively approached the most probable starting image given a convolution function and a final image; it could be used to devastating effect for reading the number-plates of motion-blurred cars, but was (in 1991) on the verge of computational unfeasibility. Has it reached the mainstream yet?

The GIMP plug-in "refocus-it" will do this for out-of-focus or motion-blurred pictures, where the convolution function is either Gaussian or linear, but makes no headway with camera-shake images.

Peter

tonyc showed me this a few months back. And that's all the help I can provide.

There was a paper in SIGGRAPH '06 on this exact topic. You can get their MatLab code and may well be able to deblur your picture.

EDIT: one of the authors of that paper gave a talk here and asked members of the audience to submit blurry pictures in advance for them to crunch on (this stuff takes hours to run, so they can't do it as a real-time demo). One of the things they *can't* deal with that might be a problem with your picture is whenever you max out a color channel. Once you get a pure white pixel, they don't know whether it's just kinda white or whether it was much, much brighter, which makes it hard to know what to do with the energy captured in those pixels. Looks like you may have some problems along those lines. Most likely, what you'd do is use their fancy deblur thing as a starting point, and then use Photoshop to clean up the output.

Easiest method = Ask someone in the city to take a cab and resnap the photo? It's still there, right?

But debur / deconvolve would be awesome.

Easiest method = Ask someone in the city to take a cab and resnap the photo? It's still there, right?

If you're interested in having the photo rather than the method of correcting it, I'm down at the garden regularly.