Sharpness Estimation for Document and Scene Images

Images of document pages have different characteristics than images of natural scenes, and so the sharpness measures developed for natural scene images do not necessarily extend to document images primarily composed of text. We present an efficient and simple method for effectively estimating the sharpness/ blurriness of document images that also performs well on natural scenes. Our method can be used to predict the sharpness in scenarios where images are blurred due to camera-motion (or hand-shake), defocus, or inherent properties of the imaging system. The proposed method outperforms the perceptually-based, no-reference sharpness work of [1] and [4], which was shown to perform better than 14 other no-reference sharpness measures on the LIVE dataset.