A joint estimation approach for two-tone image deblurring by blind deconvolution

A new statistical method is proposed for deblurring two-tone images, i.e., images with two unknown grey levels, that are blurred by an unknown linear filter. The key idea of the proposed method is to adjust a deblurring filter until its output becomes two tone. Two optimization criteria are proposed for the adjustment of the deblurring filter. A three-step iterative algorithm (TSIA) is also proposed to minimize the criteria. It is proven mathematically that by minimizing either of the criteria, the original (nonblurred) image, along with the blur filter, will be recovered uniquely (only with possible scale/shift ambiguities) at high SNR. The recovery is guaranteed not only for i.i.d. images but also for correlated and nonstationary images. It does not require a priori knowledge of the statistical parameters or the tone values of the original image; neither does it require a priori knowledge of the phase or other special information (e.g., FIR, symmetry, nonnegativity, etc.) about the blur filter. Numerical experiments are carried out to test the method on synthetic and real images.