This paper introduces a method to encode the blur operators of an arbitrary dataset of sharp-blur image pairs into a blur kernel space. Assuming the encoded kernel space is close enough to in-the-wild blur operators, we propose an alternating optimization algorithm for blind image deblurring. It approximates an unseen blur operator by a kernel in the encoded space and searches for the corresponding sharp image. Unlike recent deep-learning-based methods, our system can handle unseen blur kernel, while avoiding using complicated handcrafted priors on the blur operator often found in classical methods. Due to the method's design, the encoded kernel space is fully differentiable, thus can be easily adopted in deep neural network models. Moreover, our method can be used for blur synthesis by transferring existing blur operators from a given dataset into a new domain. Finally, we provide experimental results to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.
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…
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…
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…
Image blurring refers to the degradation of an image wherein the image's overall sharpness decreases. Image blurring is caused by several factors. Additionally, during the image acquisition process, noise may get added to the image. Such a noisy and blurred image can be represented as the image resulting from the convolution of the original image with the associated point spread function, along with additive noise. However, the blurred image often contains inadequate information to uniquely determine the plausible original image. Based on the availability of blurring information, image deblurr…
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…
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）
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…
Blind image deblurring remains a challenging problem for modern artificial neural networks. Unlike other image restoration problems, deblurring networks fail behind the performance of existing deblurring algorithms in case of uniform and 3D blur models. This follows from the diverse and profound effect that the unknown blur-kernel has on the deblurring operator. We propose a new architecture which breaks the deblurring network into an analysis network which estimates the blur, and a synthesis network that uses this kernel to deblur the image. Unlike existing deblurring networks, this design al…
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…
The conventional methods for estimating camera poses and scene structures from severely blurry or low resolution images often result in failure. The off-the-shelf deblurring or super-resolution methods may show visually pleasing results. However, applying each technique independently before matching is generally unprofitable because this naive series of procedures ignores the consistency between images. In this paper, we propose a pioneering unified framework that solves four problems simultaneously, namely, dense depth reconstruction, camera pose estimation, super-resolution, and deblurring. …
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 …
On Motion Blur and Deblurring in Visual Place Recognition
School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton（苏塞克斯大学电子与计算机科学学院）；MyWay srl（MyWay公司）；QUT Centre for Robotics, School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics（昆士兰大学机器人中心，电气工程与机器人学院）；School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex（埃塞克斯大学计算机科学与电子工程学院）
Shanghai Advanced Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院上海高等研究院）
Currently, many blind deblurring methods assume blurred images are noise-free and perform unsatisfactorily on the blurry images with noise. Unfortunately, noise is quite common in real scenes. A straightforward solution is to denoise images before deblurring them. However, even state-of-the-art denoisers cannot guarantee to remove noise entirely. Slight residual noise in the denoised images could cause significant artifacts in the deblurring stage. To tackle this problem, we propose a cascaded framework consisting of a denoiser subnetwork and a deblurring subnetwork. In contrast to previous me…
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）
The defocus deblurring raised from the finite aperture size and exposure time is an essential problem in the computational photography. It is very challenging because the blur kernel is spatially varying and difficult to estimate by traditional methods. Due to its great breakthrough in low-level tasks, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been introduced to the defocus deblurring problem and achieved significant progress. However, they apply the same kernel for different regions of the defocus blurred images, thus it is difficult to handle these nonuniform blurred images. To this end, thi…
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…
In recent years, deep neural network-based restoration methods have achieved state-of-the-art results in various image deblurring tasks. However, one major drawback of deep learning-based deblurring networks is that large amounts of blurry-clean image pairs are required for training to achieve good performance. Moreover, deep networks often fail to perform well when the blurry images and the blur kernels during testing are very different from the ones used during training. This happens mainly because of the overfitting of the network parameters on the training data. In this work, we present a …
Blind image deblurring is an important yet very challenging problem in low-level vision. Traditional optimization based methods generally formulate this task as a maximum-a-posteriori estimation or variational inference problem, whose performance highly relies on the handcraft priors for both the latent image and the blur kernel. In contrast, recent deep learning methods generally learn, from a large collection of training images, deep neural networks (DNNs) directly mapping the blurry image to the clean one or to the blur kernel, paying less attention to the physical degradation process of th…
Night photography typically suffers from both low light and blurring issues due to the dim environment and the common use of long exposure. While existing light enhancement and deblurring methods could deal with each problem individually, a cascade of such methods cannot work harmoniously to cope well with joint degradation of visibility and textures. Training an end-to-end network is also infeasible as no paired data is available to characterize the coexistence of low light and blurs. We address the problem by introducing a novel data synthesis pipeline that models realistic low-light blurrin…
CUHK（香港中文大学）；NVIDIA AI Technology Center（英伟达人工智能技术中心）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；Centre for Perceptual and Interactive Intelligence Limited（感知与交互智能中心有限公司）；Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）
In various learning-based image restoration tasks, such as image denoising and image super-resolution, the degradation representations were widely used to model the degradation process and handle complicated degradation patterns. However, they are less explored in learning-based image deblurring as blur kernel estimation cannot perform well in real-world challenging cases. We argue that it is particularly necessary for image deblurring to model degradation representations since blurry patterns typically show much larger variations than noisy patterns or high-frequency textures.In this paper, w…
Real-world dynamic scene deblurring has long been a challenging task since paired blurry-sharp training data is unavailable. Conventional Maximum A Posteriori estimation and deep learning-based deblurring methods are restricted by handcrafted priors and synthetic blurry-sharp training pairs respectively, thereby failing to generalize to real dynamic blurriness. To this end, we propose a Neural Maximum A Posteriori (NeurMAP) estimation framework for training neural networks to recover blind motion information and sharp content from unpaired data. The proposed NeruMAP consists of a motion estima…
Multi-scale Frequency Enhancement Network for Blind Image Deblurring
The Institute of Systems Engineering, Academy of Military Science（军事科学院系统工程研究所）；School of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, Jiangnan University（江南大学人工智能与计算机学院）；Jiangsu Provincial Engineering Laboratory of Pattern Recognition and Computational Intelligence, Jiangnan University（江南大学江苏省模式识别与计算智能工程实验室）；College of Artificial Intelligence, China University of Petroleum(beijing)（中国石油大学（北京）人工智能学院）；Beijing Key Laboratory of Petroleum Data Mining, China University of Petroleum(beijing)（中国石油大学（北京）北京市石油数据挖掘重点实验室）
Motion blur is a common photography artifact in dynamic environments that typically comes jointly with the other types of degradation. This paper reviews the NTIRE 2021 Challenge on Image Deblurring. In this challenge report, we describe the challenge specifics and the evaluation results from the 2 competition tracks with the proposed solutions. While both the tracks aim to recover a high-quality clean image from a blurry image, different artifacts are jointly involved. In track 1, the blurry images are in a low resolution while track 2 images are compressed in JPEG format. In each competition…
National Tsing Hua University（台湾清华大学）；National Chengchi University（政治大学）；National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University（阳明交通大学）；Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.（高通技术公司）
Images taken in dynamic scenes may contain unwanted motion blur, which significantly degrades visual quality. Such blur causes short- and long-range region-specific smoothing artifacts that are often directional and non-uniform, which is difficult to be removed. Inspired by the current success of transformers on computer vision and image processing tasks, we develop, Stripformer, a transformer-based architecture that constructs intra- and inter-strip tokens to reweight image features in the horizontal and vertical directions to catch blurred patterns with different orientations. It stacks inte…
Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）；Beijing Key Laboratory of Traffic Data Analysis and Mining（北京市交通数据分析与挖掘重点实验室）；CAAC Key Laboratory of Intelligent Passenger Service of Civil Aviation（中国民航局民航智能旅客服务重点实验室）
The Light Field (LF) deblurring task is a challenging problem as the blur images are caused by different reasons like the camera shake and the object motion. The single image deblurring method is a possible way to solve this problem. However, since it deals with each view independently and cannot effectively utilize and maintain the LF structure, the restoration effect is usually not ideal. Besides, the LF blur is more complex because the degree is affected by the views and depth. Therefore, we carefully designed a novel LF deblurring network based on the LF blur characteristics. On one hand, …
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
When a facial image is blurred, it significantly affects high-level vision tasks such as face recognition. The purpose of facial image deblurring is to recover a clear image from a blurry input image, which can improve the recognition accuracy, etc. However, general deblurring methods do not perform well on facial images. Therefore, some face deblurring methods have been proposed to improve performance by adding semantic or structural information as specific priors according to the characteristics of the facial images. In this paper, we survey and summarize recently published methods for facia…
The task of image deblurring is a very ill-posed problem as both the image and the blur are unknown. Moreover, when pictures are taken in the wild, this task becomes even more challenging due to the blur varying spatially and the occlusions between the object. Due to the complexity of the general image model we propose a novel convolutional network architecture which directly generates the sharp image.This network is built in three stages, and exploits the benefits of pyramid schemes often used in blind deconvolution. One of the main difficulties in training such a network is to design a suita…
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；Australia Centre for Robotic Vision（澳大利亚机器人视觉中心）
Camera shake during exposure is a major problem in hand-held photography, as it causes image blur that destroys details in the captured images.~In the real world, such blur is mainly caused by both the camera motion and the complex scene structure.~While considerable existing approaches have been proposed based on various assumptions regarding the scene structure or the camera motion, few existing methods could handle the real 6 DoF camera motion.~In this paper, we propose to jointly estimate the 6 DoF camera motion and remove the non-uniform blur caused by camera motion by exploiting their un…
Centre for Quantum Computation & Intelligent Systems（量子计算与智能系统中心）；Faculty of Engineering & Information Technology（工程与信息技术学院）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
This paper comprehensively reviews the recent development of image deblurring, including non-blind/blind, spatially invariant/variant deblurring techniques. Indeed, these techniques share the same objective of inferring a latent sharp image from one or several corresponding blurry images, while the blind deblurring techniques are also required to derive an accurate blur kernel. Considering the critical role of image restoration in modern imaging systems to provide high-quality images under complex environments such as motion, undesirable lighting conditions, and imperfect system components, im…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Northeast Normal University（东北师范大学）
Non-blind deblurring methods achieve decent performance under the accurate blur kernel assumption. Since the kernel uncertainty (i.e. kernel error) is inevitable in practice, semi-blind deblurring is suggested to handle it by introducing the prior of the kernel (or induced) error. However, how to design a suitable prior for the kernel (or induced) error remains challenging. Hand-crafted prior, incorporating domain knowledge, generally performs well but may lead to poor performance when kernel (or induced) error is complex. Data-driven prior, which excessively depends on the diversity and abund…
SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）
Nowadays stereo cameras are more commonly adopted in emerging devices such as dual-lens smartphones and unmanned aerial vehicles. However, they also suffer from blurry images in dynamic scenes which leads to visual discomfort and hampers further image processing. Previous works have succeeded in monocular deblurring, yet there are few studies on deblurring for stereoscopic images. By exploiting the two-view nature of stereo images, we propose a novel stereo image deblurring network with Depth Awareness and View Aggregation, named DAVANet. In our proposed network, 3D scene cues from the depth a…
Blind image deblurring is a particularly challenging inverse problem where the blur kernel is unknown and must be estimated en route to recover the deblurred image. The problem is of strong practical relevance since many imaging devices such as cellphone cameras, must rely on deblurring algorithms to yield satisfactory image quality. Despite significant research effort, handling large motions remains an open problem. In this paper, we develop a new method called Blind Image Deblurring using Row-Column Sparsity (BD-RCS) to address this issue. Specifically, we model the outer product of kernel a…
With the improvement of social life quality and the real needs of daily work, images are more and more all around us. Image blurring due to camera shake, human movement, etc. has become the key to affecting image quality. How to remove image blur and restore clear image has gradually become an important research direction in the field of computer vision. After more than half a century of unremitting efforts, the majority of scientific and technological workers have made fruitful progress in image deblurring. This article reviews the work of image deblurring and specifically introduces more cla…
