I did my thesis on using medioni's tensor voting framework to reconstruct noisy, blurry, low-res and the like images. It was sponsored by USGS on a data set that I thought was a bit of a bizarre use case. The approach worked pretty well, with some reasonable success at doing "COMPUTER ENHANCE" type computer vision magic. Later on talking with my advisor about the bizarrely mundane and uninteresting data sets we were working on from the grant he quipped that "You built a reasonable way of unblurring and enhancing unreadable images, the military doesn't care about this mundane use case." It then occurred that i'd been wildly ignorant to what I just spent 2 years of my life on.