Noncausal fractional directional differentiator and blind deconvoluation: motion blur estimation

The problem of blind estimation of motion blur parameters from a single image is addressed. The blur direction and extent of motion-blurred image, which are introduced by relative motion between a camera and its object scene, are needed in the methods of image restoration, such as blind deconvolution. As an extension to the fractional-order derivative, a noncausal fractional-order directional derivative operator is devised, which is robust to noise. Based on this new operator, a novel method identifying blur parameters is developed in this work. The performance comparison between the proposed method and the state-of-the-art method is also presented, demonstrating that the former provides better immunity to noise and capacity to identify motion blur extent, especially for large blur length.