Software to improve mobile phone picture sharpness in JPG

Question

I have an automated process that extracts data from mobile pictures. I have good binarization tools that can clear backgrounds and noise, but they are coming up short. Some pictures have slight loss of sharpness due to slow shutter, lighting, shake, etc.

What software, API, or SDK can I use to improve pre-processing of these images to produce better sharpness of text?

Here is a (redacted) samples. I need to achieve sharp text lines and hopefully separate characters in the text.

Please send me a message if you would like to get the original image (iPhone 6) and play with it. I appreciate any feedback.

Thank you.

Answer 1

Your absolute best bet is going to be Photoshop where you can go in and manually edit the picture pixel by pixel, if need be. There are also all kinds of sharpness/de-blur type of filters that you can use. You can get a trial of Adobe Creative Cloud here, and just download Photoshop.

If you're looking for something completely free, try FastStone Image Viewer which is a pretty lightweight image editor. Notable features include batch image processing and a very nice set of adjustment tools (including sharpen). I use it for many projects when I need something that opens quickly, runs quickly, and is user friendly.

Hope one of them works for you!