Image Deblurring and Noise Reduction in Python TJHSST Senior Research Project Computer Systems Lab 2009-2010

In the world of photography and machine vision, blurry images can spell disaster. They can ruin an otherwise perfect photo or make it impossible for a computer to recognize the image or certain components of it for processing. The best way to counter this without taking another, clearer picture is to utilize deconvolution techniques to remove as much blur as possible. That is the design of this project. My plan was to first design a program that takes an image, blurs it using a known blur kernel, then deblurs it to reproduce the original image. Then I created a program to take the noisy deblurred image and smooth it using noise reduction. I used Python as my programming language and the .pgm uncompressed image format. My success was be measured simply by how much the output (deblurred) image matches the input (original) image.