UNSHAKE: Software to Unblur the Blurred Image

Tips and Tricks

Do you like photography??? How do you feel when you capture a precious moment and it got blurred. Something that could’ve been a masterpiece instantly turns into a few megabytes of junk. Here is a software for you to repair your blurred images to some extend.

These images are improved by using a mathematical technique called deconvolution. Other deconvolvers have the problem that one needs to specify exactly how the picture was blurred in the first place (for example, if the camera was poorly focused, one would ideally specify not just how bad the focus was, but how fast the shutter moved at each phase of its cycle, and how many leaves the shutter had). Such deconvolvers are are commercial and expensive, and hence not an option for individual users or amateur photographers.

But, Unshake is an automatic deconvolver, also known as a “blind” deconvolver.To my knowledge, this was the first of its kind, an automatic deconvolver. Unshake analyses correspondences between nearby points in a picture, and if it finds more similarity between points than it expects, it deduces what went wrong with the image and “deconvolves” it, that is, it works out what the original scene looked like.

Unshake 1.5 is Java based and hence multi-platform (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux). It also included is a gcc3 library compiled under SuSE Linux 9.3. Unshake is a free-for-private-use software.

The software is easy to use, but requires experimentation. First-of-all the software itself attempts how much correction to apply. The actual processing time can vary greatly depending on what it decides. It varies from 40 to 50 sec for 1.3 megapixels to 5 to 7 min for a 10 megapixels image. Accordingly resize the image. You can restrict your process to a specific area by setting window around the corresponding area. It processes jpeg, png, and gif images and has an excellent user interface.

Test Images Showing Effect Of Unshake (topmost is the original and below is the corrected using Unshake):

Original:

Unshaked:

DOWNLOAD HERE and just install the Java Runtime Environment (JRE), if you haven’t got it already, and unzip the zip file.