Motion Deblurring from a Single Image using Circular Sensor Motion

Yosuke Bando		Bing-Yu Chen		Tomoyuki Nishita
TOSHIBA Corporation The University of Tokyo		National Taiwan University		The University of Tokyo

Image blur caused by object motion attenuates high frequency content of images, making post-capture deblurring an ill-posed problem. The recoverable frequency band quickly becomes narrower for faster object motion as high frequencies are severely attenuated and virtually lost. This paper proposes to translate a camera sensor circularly about the optical axis during exposure, so that high frequencies can be preserved for a wide range of in-plane linear object motion in any direction within some predetermined speed. That is, although no object may be photographed sharply at capture time, differently moving objects captured in a single image can be deconvolved with similar quality. In addition, circular sensor motion is shown to facilitate blur estimation thanks to distinct frequency zero patterns of the resulting motion blur point-spread functions. An analysis of the frequency characteristics of circular sensor motion in relation to linear object motion is presented, along with deconvolution results for photographs captured with a prototype camera.

Paper (4.1MB, PDF):
Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings of Pacific Graphics 2011), Vol. 30, No. 7, pp. 1869-1878, 2011.

Moving objects cause blur when seen from a static camera (left). By translating the camera sensor circularly, we can capture differently moving objects more sharply in a single image (middle), which can be further deblurred to reveal more details (right).
Circular sensor motion:

We translate the sensor along a circle perpendicular to the optical axis during exposure.
Please note that the sensor does not rotate.

Prototype camera:

We placed a tilted acrylic plate inside the camera lens mount,
and rotated it as shown by the yellow arrow
so that the refracted light rays (shown in red) were translated circularly.

In this image the lens is detached to show the modified lens mount.
We attach an ordinary camera lens for image capture.

Supplementary material (0.7MB, PDF):
Additional results and derivations that did not fit into the paper due to space limitation.

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