Friday, April 20, 2007
Fancy New Camera Lets You Unblur Your Pictures
Posted by Suhit Gupta in "HARDWARE" @ 08:00 AM
"You know what sucks? Taking a picture and then realizing later that the autofocus screwed you over and delivered a blurry shot. There's really nothing you can do about it at that point, so you're stuck with a fuzzy picture and friends that now know how inept you are with a camera. Here's a camera that can unfuzzy photos after the fact.Sure, you can run it through some sharpening filters in Photoshop, but that always looks pretty lousy. Luckily, there's a new piece of photographic hardware in the pipeline that'll give you the ability to unblur pictures that you've already taken. Developed by Scientists at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, the heterodyne light field camera uses a coded aperture mask to allow you to go back and fiddle with the depth of field in a picture after it's been taken. Have the background in focus instead of the foreground? Change the settings and your picture will look just how you want it to."
In the above picture, the left picture is the unfocused photo; the middle is sharpened with Photoshop; and the right one if refocused with coded aperture mask. That is quite an improvement. I like the fact that it is a simple mask that has to be added on. I wonder if it will be baked into lenses shortly to improve image quality, I guess I can only hope. :)
In the above picture, the left picture is the unfocused photo; the middle is sharpened with Photoshop; and the right one if refocused with coded aperture mask. That is quite an improvement. I like the fact that it is a simple mask that has to be added on. I wonder if it will be baked into lenses shortly to improve image quality, I guess I can only hope. :)
