Sometimes, the old adage that “two negatives yield a positive” goes beyond mathematics and enters another realm. This week, researchers from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Microsoft Research will present how two negatives can indeed equal a positive for digital photographers at SIGGRAPH 2007, the Association for Computing Machinery’s 34th annual international conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques. SIGGRAPH is considered the premier international forum for disseminating new scholarly work in computer graphics and interactive techniques, showcasing a full range of the world’s most significant achievements in the field and illuminating new directions for future investigations. SIGGRAPH 2007 runs August 5 – 9 at the San Diego Convention Center.

The paper, Image Deblurring with Blurred/Noisy Image Pairs, authored by Lu Yuan and Long Quan at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Jian Sun and Harry Shum of Microsoft Research Asia, was identified by SIGGRAPH as one of six “select highlights from the SIGGRAPH 2007 papers program.” This research will help everyday digital photographers avoid one of the more common frustrations of capturing satisfactory photos under low-light conditions using a handheld camera, which is that images are often blurred, or cluttered with noise. In the context of digital photography, “noise” refers to the speckled patterns that often look like film grain. The technology enables digital photographers to generate high quality images by combining a blurred image with a noisy one.

The Image Deblurring with Blurred/Noisy Image Pairs paper is just one of several papers Microsoft Research will present at SIGGRAPH this year, building on the company’s involvement in the conference for more than a decade.