The attached is (a crop of) a picture of a co-worker's failed attempt to "get away from it all" by going for a shopping weekend to New York, only to find a giant illuminated billboard of our product directly opposite her hotel. Unfortunately she was so traumatised that the picture has severe camera shake. Now the left and right arrows on the leftmost picture of the Vibez are nearly point sources, so the little quadrants they appear as, depict the convolution function of the whole image. So the question is, is there any software out there that can observe (or even derive) that convolution function and deconvolve the picture, restoring focus?

Back when I was a student there was this technique called "maximum entropy" which essentially iteratively approached the most probable starting image given a convolution function and a final image; it could be used to devastating effect for reading the number-plates of motion-blurred cars, but was (in 1991) on the verge of computational unfeasibility. Has it reached the mainstream yet?

The GIMP plug-in "refocus-it" will do this for out-of-focus or motion-blurred pictures, where the convolution function is either Gaussian or linear, but makes no headway with camera-shake images.

Peter