Frustration at looking at your snapshots and discovering your ace photo is a blurry mess may become a thing of the past, because local scientists have found new ways of sharpening images taken with a phone or camera.

With phone cameras in every pocket, almost everyone has taken a photo they are unhappy with.

This is often due to poor lighting conditions or camera shake. In the case of ground-based radio or optical telescopes, it is the result of turbulence in the atmosphere and ionosphere.

Now, applying state-of-the-art techniques used for space applications, researchers are working on recovering the sharp image from the recorded, blurred data.

To achieve this goal, scientists from the Institute of Space Sciences and Astronomy (ISSA) at the University of Malta have teamed up with the Computation Imaging Group of the Max-Planck Institute in Tübingen, Germany.

“Many often wonder what the point is of developing space-going technology and whether the investment in science and technology is really worth the tremendous effort, but this shows how the combination of science, engineering and ICT can bring new insights into old problem,” according to an ISSA spokesman.

This shows the combination of science, engineering and ICT can bring new insights

Scientific applications such as those found in astrophysics or medicine contain many unknown causes of image blurring, such as the atmosphere or the motion of a patient during an MRI scan.

In the research, many photos are snapped successively so that the sharp rendering of a scene can be computed from a number of images. Through the use of innovative artificial intelligence techniques, information is extracted from the pictures presented to continuously improve on a global reconstruction.

“This new method of sharpening images by combining several images together could improve the performance of optical systems several times over and promises to be useful in several imaging systems, ranging from astronomical to medical applications,” the spokesman said.

The team behind this research is made up of Dr John Abela, a senior lecturer in the Department of Information Communication Systems of the Faculty of ICT, Prof. Kristian Zarb Adami, who heads ISSA, and Adam Gauci, a PhD student in the Department of Intelligent Computer Systems (ICT). He is also a staff member of the Department of Geosciences.