Efficient Method of Detecting Blurry Images

In this paper we present a simple, efficient method for detecting the blurry photographs. Recently many digital cameras are equipped with various auto-focusing functions to help users take well-focused pictures as easily as possible. In addition, motion compensation devices are able to compensate motion causing blurriness in the images. However, digital pictures can be degraded by limited contrast, inappropriate exposure, imperfection of auto-focusing or motion compensating devices, unskillfulness of the photographers, and so on. In order to decide whether to process the images or not, or whether to delete them or not, reliable measure of image degradation to detect blurry images from sharp ones is needed. This paper presents a blurriness/sharpness measure, and demonstrates its feasibility by using extensive experiments. This method is fast, easy to implement and accurate. Regardless of the detection accuracy, the proposed measure in this paper is not demanding in computation time. Needless to say, this measure can be used for various imaging applications including auto-focusing and astigmatism correction.