Snapping a picture of something only to discover it’s hopelessly out of focus or out of frame is a constant issue for photographers. While a lack of experience in shot composition or bad lighting are issues with their own solutions, they end up with an unusable photo all the same. At least, that’s how it used to be.
Science News reports on a new computer program that can analyze out of focus photographs and reconstruct them into roughly what the original subject was meant to look like.
Researchers set about testing their program by projecting images from an LCD screen onto a wall in front of it, then obscuring the light cast by the screen with a rectangular object to create a shadow. By photographing the light and shadow present on the wall and analyzing the resulting picture, the program can fairly accurately recreate the original image from the screen.
While this concept isn’t exactly new, what makes this process unique is that none of the technology necessary for it is all that unique outside of the photo program itself. In the original experiments conducted on the program at Boston University, for example, the pictures analyzed where capture on a digital camera you could buy at any ordinary store. Even the object used to cast a shadow from the screen is not particularly important, the square shape chosen mainly for its convenience and uniformity for the original tests.
Though the practical uses for the technology are somewhat limited given the need for an intermediate object to cast a shadow, they are still there nonetheless. More importantly, as this type of technology is refined through further testing, more and more viable applications can appear as it improves. Tracking objects around corners, reconstructing poor pictures, and much more could all prove useful in the future, but time will tell exactly how advanced our technology can get for these purposes.
