Is there a way to detect if an image is blurry?

Question

I was wondering if there is a way to determine if an image is blurry or not by analyzing the image data.

Answer 1

Yes, it is. Compute the Fast Fourier Transform and analyse the result. The Fourier transform tells you which frequencies are present in the image. If there is a low amount of high frequencies, then the image is blurry.

Defining the terms 'low' and 'high' is up to you.

Edit:

As stated in the comments, if you want a single float representing the blurryness of a given image, you have to work out a suitable metric.

nikie's answer provide such a metric. Convolve the image with a Laplacian kernel:

   1
1 -4  1
   1

And use a robust maximum metric on the output to get a number which you can use for thresholding. Try to avoid smoothing too much the images before computing the Laplacian, because you will only find out that a smoothed image is indeed blurry :-).