Researchers develop algorithm to combat photo blur

Since it's unlikely that your hand will get any steadier with age, and we probably won't see optical image stabilization in cameraphones anytime soon, researchers are concentrating on ways to fix your crappy photos once they've already been captured. The latest salvo in the war against so-called hand motion blur comes from a team of computer scientists at MIT and the University of Toronto, who have developed an algorithm that can create a sharper picture by "estimating the distribution of a number of probable images" and coming up with a happy medium. Introduced at this year's Siggraph Conference in Boston, the algorithm could potentially be included in future versions of Adobe Photoshop -- which currently fights blur with a rather ineffective unsharp mask tool -- although it will do nothing for blurring caused by moving objects or improperly-focused shots. Unfortunately, it sounds like this product is still at least a year away from commercial release, so tripods and nerve-steadying Pentazemin are still your best bets for the time being.

[Thanks, Alex]