DIRECT BLIND DECONVOLUTION AND LEVY PROBABILITY DENSITIES

Alfred S. Carasso

Mathematical and Computational Sciences Division
National Institute of Standards and Technology

Friday, October 13, at 327 Yost
Refreshments: 3:30 - 4:00 p.m, Talk: 4:00 - 5:00 p.m.

Blind deconvolution seeks to deblur an image without knowing the cause of the blur. Iterative methods are commonly applied to that problem, but the iterative process is slow, uncertain, and often ill-behaved. This talk considers a significant but limited class of blurs that can be expressed as convolutions of 2-D symmetric Levy `stable' probability density functions. This class includes and generalizes Gaussian and Lorentzian distributions. For such blurs, methods are developed that can detect the point spread function from 1-D Fourier analysis of the blurred image. A separate image deblurring technique uses this detected point spread function to deblur the image. Each of these two steps uses direct non-iterative methods, and requires interactive adjustment of parameters. As a result, blind deblurring of 512X512 images can be accomplished in minutes of CPU time on current desktop workstations. Numerous blind experiments on synthetic data show that for a given blurred image, several distinct point spread functions may be detected that lead to useful, yet visually distinct reconstructions. Application to real blurred images will also be demonstrated.


Questions? Nidhan Choudhuri