Back to Focus: Image Deblurring Is Now for Documents Too
Most of us have had our fair share of bitter disappointment when the shot of a lifetime we were dying to show off to friends and family came out blurry and unfocused. In fact, it seems that the more exciting the photo opportunity is, the more likely we are to flub it! Luckily for all of us, image deblurring tools that allow anyone to deblur an image in a few clicks are available. They are fantastic and can reduce motion blur caused by the shaky hands of an overexcited photographer or the fast movements of a hyperactive model. However, as amazing as the image deblurring tools are, they all specialize in images.
Meanwhile, blurry documents happen just as often, and apart from causing disappointment, they can also be the reason for a rejected application or a failed deadline. That’s why the iScanner team took it upon themselves to fix this glaring gap in the world of image deblurring tools. We’re thrilled to announce our new feature, Document Deblur.
A Powerful Addition to the AI Enhancer Toolbox
Document deblur is yet another AI-powered feature that has become a valuable addition to iScanner’s AI Enhancer menu. For those who are yet unfamiliar with iScanner’s AI Enhancer, it’s a set of powerful AI algorithms of our own design that allow users to instantly:
- Smooth out a scanned page by removing skews, warps, and minor creases.
- Fix the geometry of a scanned page by correcting perspective distortions.
- Remove accidentally captured fingers from scans.
Now, in addition to that, users can also deblur images and sharpen out-of-focus documents. The great news is that the new feature allows users to fix not only the documents they’ve just scanned but also to upload and fix images from their gallery.
How Image Deblurring Works in iScanner
The document deblur feature is a deep learning algorithm that can cope with various types of focus and motion blur. This means the algorithm can tackle both the blur caused by shaky hands or scanning while on a bumpy bus ride and the blur in out-of-focus images. Basically, what it does is bring back the sharpness to blurry documents by removing rough and fuzzy edges and increasing the contrast between the text and the background.
- First, the algorithm identifies the pixels that differ significantly from their neighboring counterparts.
- Next, it enhances the contrast between them so that light pixels become even lighter and dark pixels become even darker.
- As a result, the contrast between the text and the background is increased, making the text appear much less blurry and more legible.
“The secret of effective document deblur is to train the neural network to understand what perfectly focused documents look like while simultaneously teaching it to identify and rectify diverse forms of motion and focus-related visual disturbances. That’s a hell of a job given how diverse document layouts and visual artifacts can be. In essence, this is what we’ve managed to do with our algorithm. We’re constantly fine-tuning it to supercharge its performance, speed, and accuracy so that you guys can take the quality of your scans up a notch with just a single tap,” says Nik, a deep learning engineer at iScanner.
How to Deblur an Image in iScanner
The flow depends on whether you need to deblur an image that you scanned with iScanner or a document from your gallery, but both ways are super straightforward.
Learn how to deblur your scanned or uploaded documents in iScanner—visit this blog post.
Whether you’re racing against the clock to complete an application, working with challenging scanning conditions, or struggling with unfocused text, Deblur and other cutting-edge tools in the AI Enhancer kit can be your secret weapons. With just a few taps, transform your scanned documents into professional, high-quality outputs that rival those produced by top-of-the-line scanner machines.
