A Robust Approach for Blur and Sharp Regions’ Detection Using Multisequential Deviated Patterns

Abstract

Blur detection (BD) is an important and challenging task in digital imaging and computer vision applications. Accurate segmentation of homogenous smooth and blur regions, low-contrast focal regions, missing patches, and background clutter, without having any prior information about the blur, are the fundamental challenges of BD. Previous work on BD has emphasized much effort on designing local sharpness metric maps from the images. However, the smooth/blurred regions having the same patterns as sharp regions make them problematic. This paper presents a robust novel method to extract the local metric map for blurred and nonblurred regions based on multisequential deviated patterns (MSDPs). Unlike the preceding, MSDP extracts the local sharpness metric map on the images at multiple scales using different adaptive thresholds to overcome the problems of smooth/blur regions and missing patches. By using the integral values of the image along with image masking and Otsu thresholding, highly accurate segmented regions of the images are acquired. We argue/hypothesize that the local sharpness map extraction by using direct integral information of the image is highly affected by the threshold selected for distinction between the regions, whereas MSDP feature extraction overcomes the limitations substantially by using automatic threshold computation over multiple scales of the images. Moreover, the proposed method extracts the relatively accurate sharp regions from the high-dense blur and noisy images. Experiments are conducted on two commonly used SHI and DUT datasets for blur and sharp region classifications. The results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of sharp segmented regions. Experimental results of qualitative and quantitative comparisons of the proposed method with ten comparative methods demonstrate the superiority of our method. Moreover, the proposed method is also computationally efficient over state-of-the-art methods.