Robust classification of blurred imagery

In this paper, we present two novel approaches for the classification of blurry images. It is assumed that the blur is linear and space invariant, but that the exact blurring function is unknown. The proposed fusion-based approaches attempt to perform the simultaneous tasks of blind image restoration and classification. We call such a problem blind image fusion. The techniques are implemented using the nonnegativity and support constraints recursive inverse filtering (NAS-RIF) algorithm for blind image restoration and the Markov random field (MRF)-based fusion method for classification by Schistad-Solberg et al.. Simulation results on synthetic and real photographic data demonstrate the potential of the approaches. The algorithms are compared with one another and to situations in which blind blur removal is not attempted.