Effects of Blur and Deblurring to Visual Object Tracking
Colledge of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University（天津大学智能与计算学部）；Key Research Center for Surface Monitoring and Analysis of Cultural Relics (SMARC), State Administration of Cultural Heritage, China（国家文物局文物表面监测与分析重点研究中心）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina（南卡罗来纳大学计算机科学与工程系）
Qing Guo, Wei Feng, Zhihao Chen, Ruijun Gao, Liang Wan, Song Wang
Intuitively, motion blur may hurt the performance of visual object tracking. However, we lack quantitative evaluation of tracker robustness to different levels of motion blur. Meanwhile, while image deblurring methods can produce visually clearer videos for pleasing human eyes, it is unknown whether visual object tracking can benefit from image deblurring or not. In this paper, we address these two problems by constructing a Blurred Video Tracking benchmark, which contains a variety of videos with different levels of motion blurs, as well as ground truth tracking results for evaluating trackers. We extensively evaluate 23 trackers on this benchmark and observe several new interesting results. Specifically, we find that light blur may improve the performance of many trackers, but heavy blur always hurts the tracking performance. We also find that image deblurring may help to improve tracking performance on heavily blurred videos but hurt the performance on lightly blurred videos. According to these observations, we propose a new GAN based scheme to improve the tracker robustness to motion blurs. In this scheme, a finetuned discriminator is used as an adaptive assessor to selectively deblur frames during the tracking process. We use this scheme to successfully improve the accuracy and robustness of 6 trackers.
For the success of video deblurring, it is essential to utilize information from neighboring frames. Most state-of-the-art video deblurring methods adopt motion compensation between video frames to aggregate information from multiple frames that can help deblur a target frame. However, the motion compensation methods adopted by previous deblurring methods are not blur-invariant, and consequently, their accuracy is limited for blurry frames with different blur amounts. To alleviate this problem, we propose two novel approaches to deblur videos by effectively aggregating information from multipl…
SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；Qing Yuan Research Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学清源研究院）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；School of Software Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学软件学院）
Deblurring can not only provide visually more pleasant pictures and make photography more convenient, but also can improve the performance of objection detection as well as tracking. However, removing dynamic scene blur from images is a non-trivial task as it is difficult to model the non-uniform blur mathematically. Several methods first use single or multiple images to estimate optical flow (which is treated as an approximation of blur kernels) and then adopt non-blind deblurring algorithms to reconstruct the sharp images. However, these methods cannot be trained in an end-to-end manner and …
One of the key components for video deblurring is how to exploit neighboring frames. Recent state-of-the-art methods either used aligned adjacent frames to the center frame or propagated the information on past frames to the current frame recurrently. Here we propose multi-blur-to-deblur (MB2D), a novel concept to exploit neighboring frames for efficient video deblurring. Firstly, inspired by unsharp masking, we argue that using more blurred images with long exposures as additional inputs significantly improves performance. Secondly, we propose multi-blurring recurrent neural network (MBRNN) t…
We present a novel, blind, single image deblurring method that utilizes information regarding blur kernels. Our model solves the deblurring problem by dividing it into two successive tasks: (1) blur kernel estimation and (2) sharp image restoration. We first introduce a kernel estimation network that produces adaptive blur kernels based on the analysis of the blurred image. The network learns the blur pattern of the input image and trains to generate the estimation of image-specific blur kernels. Subsequently, we propose a deblurring network that restores sharp images using the estimated blur …
Training learning-based deblurring methods demands a tremendous amount of blurred and sharp image pairs. Unfortunately, existing synthetic datasets are not realistic enough, and deblurring models trained on them cannot handle real blurred images effectively. While real datasets have recently been proposed, they provide limited diversity of scenes and camera settings, and capturing real datasets for diverse settings is still challenging. To resolve this, this paper analyzes various factors that introduce differences between real and synthetic blurred images. To this end, we present RSBlur, a no…
While recent deep deblurring algorithms have achieved remarkable progress, most existing methods focus on the global deblurring problem, where the image blur mostly arises from severe camera shake. We argue that the local blur, which is mostly derived from moving objects with a relatively static background, is prevalent but remains under-explored. In this paper, we first lay the data foundation for local deblurring by constructing, for the first time, a LOcal-DEblur (LODE) dataset consisting of 3,700 real-world captured locally blurred images and their corresponding ground-truth. Then, we prop…
In this paper, we examine the problem of real-world image deblurring and take into account two key factors for improving the performance of the deep image deblurring model, namely, training data synthesis and network architecture design. Deblurring models trained on existing synthetic datasets perform poorly on real blurry images due to domain shift. To reduce the domain gap between synthetic and real domains, we propose a novel realistic blur synthesis pipeline to simulate the camera imaging process. As a result of our proposed synthesis method, existing deblurring models could be made more r…
College of Optical Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University（浙江大学光电科学与工程学院）；Research Center for Intelligent Sensing Systems, Zhejiang Laboratory（之江实验室智能感知系统研究中心）
Most existing deblurring methods focus on removing global blur caused by camera shake, while they cannot well handle local blur caused by object movements. To fill the vacancy of local deblurring in real scenes, we establish the first real local motion blur dataset (ReLoBlur), which is captured by a synchronized beam-splitting photographing system and corrected by a post-progressing pipeline. Based on ReLoBlur, we propose a Local Blur-Aware Gated network (LBAG) and several local blur-aware techniques to bridge the gap between global and local deblurring: 1) a blur detection approach based on b…
Korea Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术院）；Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；Seoul National University（首尔大学）
We present a deblurring method for scenes with occluding objects using a carefully designed layered blur model. Layered blur model is frequently used in the motion deblurring problem to handle locally varying blurs, which is caused by object motions or depth variations in a scene. However, conventional models have a limitation in representing the layer interactions occurring at occlusion boundaries. In this paper, we address this limitation in both theoretical and experimental ways, and propose a new layered blur model reflecting actual blur generation process. Based on this model, we develop …
State-of-the-art video deblurring methods cannot handle blurry videos recorded in dynamic scenes, since they are built under a strong assumption that the captured scenes are static. Contrary to the existing methods, we propose a video deblurring algorithm that can deal with general blurs inherent in dynamic scenes. To handle general and locally varying blurs caused by various sources, such as moving objects, camera shake, depth variation, and defocus, we estimate pixel-wise non-uniform blur kernels. We infer bidirectional optical flows to handle motion blurs, and also estimate Gaussian blur ma…
Present-day deep learning-based motion deblurring methods utilize the pair of synthetic blur and sharp data to regress any particular framework. This task is designed for directly translating a blurry image input into its restored version as output. The aforementioned approach relies heavily on the quality of the synthetic blurry data, which are only available before the training stage. Handling this issue by providing a large amount of data is expensive for common usage. We answer this challenge by providing an on-the-fly blurry data augmenter that can be run during training and test stages. …
In this paper, we study the problem of recovering a sharp version of a given blurry image when the blur kernel is unknown. Previous methods often introduce an image-independent regularizer (such as Gaussian or sparse priors) on the desired blur kernel. We shall show that the blurry image itself encodes rich information about the blur kernel. Such information can be found through analyzing and comparing how the spectrum of an image as a convolution operator changes before and after blurring. Our analysis leads to an effective convex regularizer on the blur kernel which depends only on the given…
Domain-adaptive Video Deblurring via Test-time Blurring
National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University（国立阳明交通大学）；National Tsing Hua University（国立清华大学）；National Chengchi University（国立政治大学）；Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.（高通技术公司）
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；Rakuten Institute of Technology（乐天技术研究所）；ACRV（澳大利亚机器人视觉中心）
Existing deep learning methods for image deblurring typically train models using pairs of sharp images and their blurred counterparts. However, synthetically blurring images do not necessarily model the genuine blurring process in real-world scenarios with sufficient accuracy. To address this problem, we propose a new method which combines two GAN models, i.e., a learning-to-Blur GAN (BGAN) and learning-to-DeBlur GAN (DBGAN), in order to learn a better model for image deblurring by primarily learning how to blur images. The first model, BGAN, learns how to blur sharp images with unpaired sharp…
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）
Blind image deblurring is a fundamental and challenging computer vision problem, which aims to recover both the blur kernel and the latent sharp image from only a blurry observation. Despite the superiority of deep learning methods in image deblurring have displayed, there still exists major challenge with various non-uniform motion blur. Previous methods simply take all the image features as the input to the decoder, which handles different degrees (e.g. large blur, small blur) simultaneously, leading to challenges for sharp image generation. To tackle the above problems, we present a deep tw…
Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）
This paper aims at exploring how to synthesize close-to-real blurs that existing video deblurring models trained on them can generalize well to real-world blurry videos. In recent years, deep learning-based approaches have achieved promising success on video deblurring task. However, the models trained on existing synthetic datasets still suffer from generalization problems over real-world blurry scenarios with undesired artifacts. The factors accounting for the failure remain unknown. Therefore, we revisit the classical blur synthesis pipeline and figure out the possible reasons, including sh…
MC-Blur: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Image Deblurring
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Nanjing University（南京大学）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Rakuten Institute of Technology（乐天技术研究所）；Tencent（腾讯）；University of California at Merced（加州大学默塞德分校）
ID-Blau: Image Deblurring by Implicit Diffusion-based reBLurring AUgmentation
National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University（国立阳明交通大学）；National Tsing Hua University（国立清华大学）；National Chengchi University（国立政治大学）；Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.（高通技术公司）
The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；HKUST Guangzhou（香港科技大学（广州））；Huawei（华为）；HKUST（香港科技大学）
Video deblurring is a highly under-constrained problem due to the spatially and temporally varying blur. An intuitive approach for video deblurring includes two steps: a) detecting the blurry region in the current frame; b) utilizing the information from clear regions in adjacent frames for current frame deblurring. To realize this process, our idea is to detect the pixel-wise blur level of each frame and combine it with video deblurring. To this end, we propose a novel framework that utilizes the motion magnitude prior (MMP) as guidance for efficient deep video deblurring. Specifically, as th…
Peking University（北京大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；National Institute of Informatics（国立信息学研究所）
Blind image deblurring, i.e., deblurring without knowledge of the blur kernel, is a highly ill-posed problem. The problem can be solved in two parts: i) estimate a blur kernel from the blurry image, and ii) given estimated blur kernel, de-convolve blurry input to restore the target image. In this paper, by interpreting an image patch as a signal on a weighted graph, we first argue that a skeleton image---a proxy that retains the strong gradients of the target but smooths out the details---can be used to accurately estimate the blur kernel and has a unique bi-modal edge weight distribution. We …
Peking University（北京大学）；National Institute of Informatics（国立信息学研究所）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）
Blind image deblurring, i.e., deblurring without knowledge of the blur kernel, is a highly ill-posed problem. The problem can be solved in two parts: i) estimate a blur kernel from the blurry image, and ii) given estimated blur kernel, de-convolve blurry input to restore the target image. In this paper, we propose a graph-based blind image deblurring algorithm by interpreting an image patch as a signal on a weighted graph. Specifically, we first argue that a skeleton image---a proxy that retains the strong gradients of the target but smooths out the details---can be used to accurately estimate…
Image deblurring aims to restore the latent sharp images from the corresponding blurred ones. In this paper, we present an unsupervised method for domain-specific single-image deblurring based on disentangled representations. The disentanglement is achieved by splitting the content and blur features in a blurred image using content encoders and blur encoders. We enforce a KL divergence loss to regularize the distribution range of extracted blur attributes such that little content information is contained. Meanwhile, to handle the unpaired training data, a blurring branch and the cycle-consiste…
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Australian Centre for Robotic Vision（澳大利亚机器人视觉中心）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）
The image blurring process is generally modelled as the convolution of a blur kernel with a latent image. Therefore, the estimation of the blur kernel is essentially important for blind image deblurring. Unlike existing approaches which focus on approaching the problem by enforcing various priors on the blur kernel and the latent image, we are aiming at obtaining a high quality blur kernel directly by studying the problem in the frequency domain. We show that the auto-correlation of the absolute phase-only image can provide faithful information about the motion (e.g. the motion direction and m…
Non-uniform blind deblurring for general dynamic scenes is a challenging computer vision problem as blurs arise not only from multiple object motions but also from camera shake, scene depth variation. To remove these complicated motion blurs, conventional energy optimization based methods rely on simple assumptions such that blur kernel is partially uniform or locally linear. Moreover, recent machine learning based methods also depend on synthetic blur datasets generated under these assumptions. This makes conventional deblurring methods fail to remove blurs where blur kernel is difficult to a…
Several state-of-the-art video deblurring methods are based on a strong assumption that the captured scenes are static. These methods fail to deblur blurry videos in dynamic scenes. We propose a video deblurring method to deal with general blurs inherent in dynamic scenes, contrary to other methods. To handle locally varying and general blurs caused by various sources, such as camera shake, moving objects, and depth variation in a scene, we approximate pixel-wise kernel with bidirectional optical flows. Therefore, we propose a single energy model that simultaneously estimates optical flows and…
Seoul National University（首尔大学）；Inha University（仁荷大学）
Removing camera motion blur from a single light field is a challenging task since it is highly ill-posed inverse problem. The problem becomes even worse when blur kernel varies spatially due to scene depth variation and high-order camera motion. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm to estimate all blur model variables jointly, including latent sub-aperture image, camera motion, and scene depth from the blurred 4D light field. Exploiting multi-view nature of a light field relieves the inverse property of the optimization by utilizing strong depth cues and multi-view blur observation. The…
Blind Image deblurring tries to estimate blurriness and a latent image out of a blurred image. This estimation, as being an ill-posed problem, requires imposing restrictions on the latent image or a blur kernel that represents blurriness. Different from recent studies that impose some priors on the latent image, this paper regulates the structure of the blur kernel. We propose a kernel mixture structure while using the Gaussian kernel as a base kernel. By combining multiple Gaussian kernels structurally enhanced in terms of scales and centers, the kernel mixture becomes capable of modeling nea…
School of Informatics（信息学院）；Xiamen University（厦门大学）
Low-quality face image restoration is a popular research direction in today's computer vision field. It can be used as a pre-work for tasks such as face detection and face recognition. At present, there is a lot of work to solve the problem of low-quality faces under various environmental conditions. This paper mainly focuses on the restoration of motion-blurred faces. In increasingly abundant mobile scenes, the fast recovery of motion-blurred faces can bring highly effective speed improvements in tasks such as face matching. In order to achieve this goal, a deblurring method for motion-blurre…
Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics, Chinese Academy of Science（中国科学院长春光学精密机械与物理研究所）；Changchun University of Science and Technology（长春理工大学）
The goal of blind image deblurring is to recover sharp image from one input blurred image with an unknown blur kernel. Most of image deblurring approaches focus on developing image priors, however, there is not enough attention to the influence of image details and structures on the blur kernel estimation. What is the useful image structure and how to choose a good deblurring region? In this work, we propose a deep neural network model method for selecting good regions to estimate blur kernel. First we construct image patches with labels and train a deep neural networks, then the learned model…
Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications（重庆邮电大学）；Chongqing University（重庆大学）
Most existing deep-learning-based single image dynamic scene blind deblurring (SIDSBD) methods usually design deep networks to directly remove the spatially-variant motion blurs from one inputted motion blurred image, without blur kernels estimation. In this paper, inspired by the Projective Motion Path Blur (PMPB) model and deformable convolution, we propose a novel constrained deformable convolutional network (CDCN) for efficient single image dynamic scene blind deblurring, which simultaneously achieves accurate spatially-variant motion blur kernels estimation and the high-quality image rest…
National Tsing Hua University（国立清华大学）；National Chengchi University（国立政治大学）；Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.（高通技术公司）；National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University（国立阳明交通大学）
Image motion blur results from a combination of object motions and camera shakes, and such blurring effect is generally directional and non-uniform. Previous research attempted to solve non-uniform blurs using self-recurrent multiscale, multi-patch, or multi-temporal architectures with self-attention to obtain decent results. However, using self-recurrent frameworks typically lead to a longer inference time, while inter-pixel or inter-channel self-attention may cause excessive memory usage. This paper proposes a Blur-aware Attention Network (BANet), that accomplishes accurate and efficient deb…
ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；Univeristy of Tübingen（图宾根大学）；Microsoft Mixed Reality and Artificial Intelligence Lab（微软混合现实与人工智能实验室）；Chalmers University of Technology（查尔姆斯理工大学）
Motion blurry images challenge many computer vision algorithms, e.g, feature detection, motion estimation, or object recognition. Deep convolutional neural networks are state-of-the-art for image deblurring. However, obtaining training data with corresponding sharp and blurry image pairs can be difficult. In this paper, we present a differentiable reblur model for self-supervised motion deblurring, which enables the network to learn from real-world blurry image sequences without relying on sharp images for supervision. Our key insight is that motion cues obtained from consecutive images yield …
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）
Motion deblurring has witnessed rapid development in recent years, and most of the recent methods address it by using deep learning techniques, with the help of different kinds of prior knowledge. Concerning that deblurring is essentially expected to improve the image sharpness, edge information can serve as an important prior. However, the edge has not yet been seriously taken into consideration in previous methods when designing deep models. To this end, we present a novel framework that incorporates edge prior knowledge into deep models, termed Edge Prior Augmented Networks (EPAN). EPAN has…
Slow shutter speed and long exposure time of frame-based cameras often cause visual blur and loss of inter-frame information, degenerating the overall quality of captured videos. To this end, we present a unified framework of event-based motion deblurring and frame interpolation for blurry video enhancement, where the extremely low latency of events is leveraged to alleviate motion blur and facilitate intermediate frame prediction. Specifically, the mapping relation between blurry frames and sharp latent images is first predicted by a learnable double integral network, and a fusion network is …
Technion–Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院）；KTH Royal Institute of Technology（瑞典皇家理工学院）
In blind motion deblurring, leading methods today tend towards highly non-convex approximations of the l0-norm, especially in the image regularization term. In this paper, we propose a simple, effective and fast approach for the estimation of the motion blur-kernel, through a bi-l0-l2-norm regularization imposed on both the intermediate sharp image and the blur-kernel. Compared with existing methods, the proposed regularization is shown to be more effective and robust, leading to a more accurate motion blur-kernel and a better final restored image. A fast numerical scheme is deployed for alter…
In this work we explore the previously proposed approach of direct blind deconvolution and denoising with convolutional neural networks in a situation where the blur kernels are partially constrained. We focus on blurred images from a real-life traffic surveillance system, on which we, for the first time, demonstrate that neural networks trained on artificial data provide superior reconstruction quality on real images compared to traditional blind deconvolution methods. The training data is easy to obtain by blurring sharp photos from a target system with a very rough approximation of the expe…
SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）
Video deblurring is a challenging task due to the spatially variant blur caused by camera shake, object motions, and depth variations, etc. Existing methods usually estimate optical flow in the blurry video to align consecutive frames or approximate blur kernels. However, they tend to generate artifacts or cannot effectively remove blur when the estimated optical flow is not accurate. To overcome the limitation of separate optical flow estimation, we propose a Spatio-Temporal Filter Adaptive Network (STFAN) for the alignment and deblurring in a unified framework. The proposed STFAN takes both …
University of Oulu（奥卢大学）；Aalto University（阿尔托大学）；Czech Technical University Prague（布拉格捷克理工大学）
Many computer vision and image processing applications rely on local features. It is well-known that motion blur decreases the performance of traditional feature detectors and descriptors. We propose an inertial-based deblurring method for improving the robustness of existing feature detectors and descriptors against the motion blur. Unlike most deblurring algorithms, the method can handle spatially-variant blur and rolling shutter distortion. Furthermore, it is capable of running in real-time contrary to state-of-the-art algorithms. The limitations of inertial-based blur estimation are taken …
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
Typical blur from camera shake often deviates from the standard uniform convolutional script, in part because of problematic rotations which create greater blurring away from some unknown center point. Consequently, successful blind deconvolution requires the estimation of a spatially-varying or non-uniform blur operator. Using ideas from Bayesian inference and convex analysis, this paper derives a non-uniform blind deblurring algorithm with several desirable, yet previously-unexplored attributes. The underlying objective function includes a spatially adaptive penalty which couples the latent …
Wuhan University（武汉大学）；Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；Noah’s Ark Lab, Huawei Technologies（华为技术有限公司诺亚方舟实验室）
In this paper, we propose an end-to-end learning framework for event-based motion deblurring in a self-supervised manner, where real-world events are exploited to alleviate the performance degradation caused by data inconsistency. To achieve this end, optical flows are predicted from events, with which the blurry consistency and photometric consistency are exploited to enable self-supervision on the deblurring network with real-world data. Furthermore, a piece-wise linear motion model is proposed to take into account motion non-linearities and thus leads to an accurate model for the physical f…
NEC Laboratories America（NEC美国实验室）；University of California, San Diego（加利福尼亚大学圣迭戈分校）；ByteDance AI Lab（字节跳动人工智能实验室）；Texas A&M University（得克萨斯农工大学）
Blind video deblurring restores sharp frames from a blurry sequence without any prior. It is a challenging task because the blur due to camera shake, object movement and defocusing is heterogeneous in both temporal and spatial dimensions. Traditional methods train on datasets synthesized with a single level of blur, and thus do not generalize well across levels of blurriness. To address this challenge, we propose a dual attention mechanism to dynamically aggregate temporal cues for deblurring with an end-to-end trainable network structure. Specifically, an internal attention module adaptively …
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Defocus blur is one kind of blur effects often seen in images, which is challenging to remove due to its spatially variant amount. This paper presents an end-to-end deep learning approach for removing defocus blur from a single image, so as to have an all-in-focus image for consequent vision tasks. First, a pixel-wise Gaussian kernel mixture (GKM) model is proposed for representing spatially variant defocus blur kernels in an efficient linear parametric form, with higher accuracy than existing models. Then, a deep neural network called GKMNet is developed by unrolling a fixed-point iteration o…
East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；the Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
Blur was naturally analyzed in the frequency domain, by estimating the latent sharp image and the blur kernel given a blurry image. Recent progress on image deblurring always designs end-to-end architectures and aims at learning the difference between blurry and sharp image pairs from pixel-level, which inevitably overlooks the importance of blur kernels. This paper reveals an intriguing phenomenon that simply applying ReLU operation on the frequency domain of a blur image followed by inverse Fourier transform, i.e., frequency selection, provides faithful information about the blur pattern (e.…
The goal of blind image deblurring is to recover a sharp image from a motion blurred one without knowing the camera motion. Current state-of-the-art methods have a remarkably good performance on images with no noise or very low noise levels. However, the noiseless assumption is not realistic considering that low light conditions are the main reason for the presence of motion blur due to requiring longer exposure times. In fact, motion blur and high to moderate noise often appear together. Most works approach this problem by first estimating the blur kernel $k$ and then deconvolving the noisy b…
