Blind Removal of Lens Distortions

H. Farid and A.C. Popescu

Journal of the Optical Society of America, 18(9):2072-2078, 2001

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Virtually all imaging devices introduce some amount of geometric lens distortion. This paper presents a technique for blindly removing these distortions in the absence of any calibration information or explicit knowledge of the imaging device. The basic approach exploits the fact that lens distortion introduces specific higher-order correlations in the frequency domain. These correlations can be detected using tools from polyspectral analysis. The amount of distortion is then estimated by minimizing these correlations.