Introduction
The major image processing technologies include
restoration, enhancement, compression and recognition.
For the application in forensic science, image restoration
and image enhancement are frequently used. In this
paper, we concentrate our attention on image restoration.
The field of image restoration began primarily in the
space programs of both the United States and the former
Soviet Union in the 1950s and early 1960s [1]. The
image restoration technology was also extended to other
fields, such as medical imaging [2] and forensic science
[3]. The ultimate goal of restoration techniques is to
improve the quality of a degraded image. The degradation
phenomena may come from motion blur, atmospheric
turbulence blur, out-of-focus blur and electronic noises.
In practice, we consider image restoration to be a
process that attempts to reconstruct or recover a degraded
image by using knowledge of the causes of the degradation
phenomena. Thus restoration techniques are oriented
toward mathematically modeling the degradation
(point spread functions, PSF’s) and applying the inverse
process to recover the original image [1,4,5].