Deconvolution of several versions of a scene perturbed by different defocus blurs: influence of kernel diameters on restoration quality and on robustness to kernel estimation

It has been shown many times that using different versions of a scene pertu rbed with different blurs improved the quality of a restored image compared with using a single blurred image. We focus on large defocus blurs, and we first consider a case in which two different blurring kernels are used. We analyze with numerical simulations the influence of the relative diameter of both kernels on the quality of restoration. We then quantitatively evalu ate how the two-kernel approach improves the robustness of restoration to a difference between the kernels used in designing the algorithm and the act ual kernels that have perturbed the image. We finally show that using three different kernels may not improve the restoration performance compared wit h the two-kernel approach but still improves the robustness to kernel estim ation. (C) 2000 Optical Society of America OCIS codes: 100.0100, 100.1830, 100.3190, 100.2000.