Local Blur Assessment in Natural Images

Abstract

International audienceThis paper presents a local no-reference blur assessment method in natural macro-like images. The purpose is to decide the blurriness of the object of interest. In our case, it represents the first step for a plant recognition system. Blur detection works on small non-overlapping blocks using wavelet decomposition and edge classification. At the block level the number of edges is less than on global images. A new set of rules is obtained by a supervised decision tree algorithm trained on a manually labelled base of 1500 blurred/un-blurred images. Our purpose is to achieve a qualitative decision of the blurriness/sharpness of the object of interest making it the first step towards a segmentation process. Experimental results show this method outperforms two other methods found in literature, even if applied on a block basis. Together with a pre-segmentation step, the method allows to decide if the object of interest (leaf, flower) is sharp in order to extract precise botanical key identification features (e. g. leaf border)