A Robust Method For Restoration Of Photon-Limited, Blurred Images
William A. Pearlman, Woo‐Jin Song · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1984
A two-step procedure is developed for restoring low light level images degraded by a linear space-invariant blur. The first step uses a linear minimum mean square point estimate of the blurred image. The second removes the blur through a constrained linear least squares technique where the error of the first step is treated as additive noise. No prior knowledge of the object is required, as the procedure utilizes sample statistics in an analysis window around each received image element to develop the estimators. The size of the window is adaptive, as it is adjusted for the next image element according to an activity index computed for the current window. In experiments with simulated photon-noise-degraded, lineal-motion-blurred images, the efficacy of the procedure is demonstrated visually and measured by signal-to-noise ratio improvements.