Spatiotemporal Phase Aperture Coding for Motion Deblurring

This book chapter proposes a joint optical-digital processing method for motion deblurring in photography. The problem of motion-related image blur limits the exposure time for capturing moving objects, making it challenging to achieve proper exposure. To compensate for this issue, the proposed method utilizes dynamic phase-coding in the lens aperture during image acquisition, which encodes the motion trajectory in an intermediate optical image. The coding embeds cues for both motion direction and extent by coloring the spatial blur of each object. These color cues serve as guidance for a digital deblurring process, implemented using a convolutional neural net-work trained to utilize such coding for image restoration. The proposed approach encodes cues with no limitation on the motion direction and without sacrificing light efficiency. The advantage of the proposed approach is demonstrated over blind-deblurring methods with no optical coding, as well as over other solutions that use coded acquisition, both in simulation and real-world experiments. The joint optical-digital processing method presented in this chapter provides a promising solution for motion deblurring in photography, which can increase light throughput without motion artifacts and improve image quality.