NEW TECHNIQUE FOR BLIND DECONVOLUTION

Frequently an image may be blurred by a point spread function whose details are not known exactly. In such a case, it is necessary to estimate the point spread function before deconvolving the blurred image. A new technique is presented for estimating a zero phase blurring function when its optical transfer function is smooth. The estimate is obtained by smoothing the spectral magnitude of the image and comparing it to an average magnitude that is also smoothed. The average magnitude is obtained by averaging over an ensemble of similar images. The estimate can be extended to degradations such as a defocused lens by thresholding the estimation magnitude to obtain zero crossings and adjusting the phase accordingly. This technique can be applied to a circularly symmetric Gaussian blur or a defocused lens with a circular aperture.