The Holy Grail - photography

Now this is interesting - from DIY Photography:

SCIENTISTS DEVELOP AN ALGORITHM THAT RECOVERS DETAIL IN YOUR BLURRY PHOTOS
A group of MIT researchers has come up with a way to recover lost details from your blurry images and even videos. They have developed an algorithm that recognizes and automatically recovers blurred parts in your videos and stills.

The algorithm is called a “visual deprojection model” and it’s based on a convolutional neural network. The scientists trained the algorithm by feeding it blurry images and their high-quality counterparts. This way, the algorithm “learns” a pattern that allows it to recreate the blurry bits and make them sharp.

In one of their experiments, the researchers tested the algorithm on 35 videos of 30 people walking in a specified area.

“They collapsed all frames into projections that they used to train and test the model. From a hold-out set of six unseen projections, the model accurately recreated 24 frames of the person’s gait, down to the position of their legs and the person’s size as they walked toward or away from the camera. The model seems to learn, for instance, that pixels that get darker and wider with time likely correspond to a person walking closer to the camera.”

Not a panacea - it needs to be trained with photos that are blurry and then the same photos that are sharp but still, once the database gets large enough, it might have some use.