A novel modified cepstral based technique for blind estimation of motion blur

In the problem of blind image deconvolution, estimation of blurring kernel is the first and foremost important step. Quality of restored image highly depends upon the accuracy of this estimation. In this paper we propose a modified cepstrum domain approach combined with bit-plane slicing method to estimate uniform motion blur parameters, which improves the accuracy without any manual intervention. A single motion blurred image under spatial invariance condition is considered. It is noted that the fourth bit plane of the modified cepstrum carries an important cue for estimating the blur direction. With the exploration of this bit plane no other post processing is required to estimate blur direction. The experimental evaluation is carried out on both real-blurred photographs and synthetically blurred standard test images such as Berkeley segmentation dataset and USC-SIPI texture image database. The experimental results show that the proposed method is capable of estimating blur parameters more accurately than the existing methods. (C) 2013 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.