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

I came up with a totally different solution. I needed to analyse video still frames to find the sharpest one in every (X) frames. This way, I would detect motion blur and/or out of focus images.

I ended up using Canny Edge detection and I got VERY VERY good results with almost every kind of video (with nikie's method, I had problems with digitalized VHS videos and heavy interlaced videos).

I optimized the performance by setting a region of interest (ROI) on the original image.

Using EmguCV :

//Convert image using Canny
using (Image imgCanny = imgOrig.Canny(225, 175))
{
    //Count the number of pixel representing an edge
    int nCountCanny = imgCanny.CountNonzero()[0];

    //Compute a sharpness grade:
    //< 1.5 = blurred, in movement
    //de 1.5 à 6 = acceptable
    //> 6 =stable, sharp
    double dSharpness = (nCountCanny * 1000.0 / (imgCanny.Cols * imgCanny.Rows));
}