Now, software that can turn blurry snaps into pics worth keeping

LONDON: A team of engineers has developed software that can transform blurry photographs into clear pictures.

Computer vision engineer Neel Joshi at the University of California, San Diego, and his colleagues studied home photo collections and saw that many pictures of faces were blurry.

"Precious moments were often lost due to blur induced by camera shake and poor lighting," The New Scientist quoted him as saying.

The team then came up with software to solve that problem.

Their algorithm uses facial recognition methods like those in some photo editors to find a sharp image with a similar pose.

The pattern of colour and light in the blurry face is then tweaked to match the model photo.

The study has been published in ACM Transactions on Graphics.