[IPOL announce] new article: The Flutter Shutter Code Calculator

[announcements about the IPOL journal]

A new article is available in IPOL: http://www.ipol.im/pub/art/2015/108/

Yohann Tendero,
The Flutter Shutter Code Calculator,
Image Processing On Line, 5 (2015), pp. 234–256.
http://dx.doi.org/10.5201/ipol.2015.108

Abstract
The goal of the flutter shutter is to make uniform motion blur 
invertible, by a "fluttering" shutter that opens and closes on a 
sequence of well chosen sub-intervals of the exposure time interval. In 
other words, the photon flux is modulated according to a well chosen 
sequence called flutter shutter code. This article provides a numerical 
method that computes optimal flutter shutter codes in terms of mean 
square error (MSE). We assume that the observed objects follow a known 
(or learned) random velocity distribution. In this paper, Gaussian and 
uniform velocity distributions are considered. Snapshots are also 
optimized taking the velocity distribution into account. For each 
velocity distribution, the gain of the optimal flutter shutter code with 
respect to the optimal snapshot in terms of MSE is computed. This 
symmetric optimization of the flutter shutter and of the snapshot allows 
to compare on an equal footing both solutions, i.e. camera designs. 
Optimal flutter shutter codes are demonstrated to improve substantially 
the MSE compared to classic (patented or not) codes. A numerical method 
that permits to perform a reverse engineering of any existing (patented 
or not) flutter shutter codes is also described and an implementation is 
given. In this case we give the underlying velocity distribution from 
which a given optimal flutter shutter code comes from. The combination 
of these two numerical methods furnishes a comprehensive study of the 
optimization of a flutter shutter that includes a forward and a backward 
numerical solution.