Method and apparatus for motion blur and ghosting prevention in imaging system

Abstract

A method and apparatus for motion blur and ghosting prevention in imaging system is presented. A residue image is computed by performing spatial-temporal filter with a set of absolute image difference of image pairs from input images. A noise adaptive pixel threshold is computed for every pixel based on noise statistics of image sensor. The residue image and the noise adaptive pixel threshold are used to create a motion masking map. The motion masking map is used to represent motion and non-motion pixels in pixels merging. The pixels merging step is performed to generate an output image by considering the motion pixels where the motion pixels are performed separately. The resulting output image having no or less motion blur and ghosting artifacts can be obtained, even the input images having different degree of motion blur between each of the image, while the complexity is low. It is preferred that the current invention is applied in the Bayer raw domain. The benefit is reduced computation and memory because only 1 color component is processed for each pixel. Another benefit is higher signal fidelity because processing in the Bayer raw domain is unaffected by demosaicing artifacts, especially along edges. However, the current invention can also be applied in RGB domain.