Motion Deblurring in the Wild

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 suitable dataset. While useful data can be obtained by synthetically blurring a collection of images, more realistic data must be collected in the wild. To obtain such data we use a high frame rate video camera and keep one frame as the sharp image and frame average as the corresponding blurred image. We show that this realistic dataset is key in achieving state-of-the-art performance and dealing with occlusions

A Robust Real-Time Automatic License Plate Recognition Based on the YOLO Detector

Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) has been a frequent topic of research due to many practical applications. However, many of the current solutions are still not robust in real-world situations, commonly depending on many constraints. This paper presents a robust and efficient ALPR system based on the state-of-the-art YOLO object detector. The Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are trained and fine-tuned for each ALPR stage so that they are robust under different conditions (e.g., variations in camera, lighting, and background). Specially for character segmentation and recognition, we design a two-stage approach employing simple data augmentation tricks such as inverted License Plates (LPs) and flipped characters. The resulting ALPR approach achieved impressive results in two datasets. First, in the SSIG dataset, composed of 2,000 frames from 101 vehicle videos, our system achieved a recognition rate of 93.53% and 47 Frames Per Second (FPS), performing better than both Sighthound and OpenALPR commercial systems (89.80% and 93.03%, respectively) and considerably outperforming previous results (81.80%). Second, targeting a more realistic scenario, we introduce a larger public dataset, called UFPR-ALPR dataset, designed to ALPR. This dataset contains 150 videos and 4,500 frames captured when both camera and vehicles are moving and also contains different types of vehicles (cars, motorcycles, buses and trucks). In our proposed dataset, the trial versions of commercial systems achieved recognition rates below 70%. On the other hand, our system performed better, with recognition rate of 78.33% and 35 FPS.Comment: Accepted for presentation at the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN) 201

Learning Blind Motion Deblurring

As handheld video cameras are now commonplace and available in every smartphone, images and videos can be recorded almost everywhere at anytime. However, taking a quick shot frequently yields a blurry result due to unwanted camera shake during recording or moving objects in the scene. Removing these artifacts from the blurry recordings is a highly ill-posed problem as neither the sharp image nor the motion blur kernel is known. Propagating information between multiple consecutive blurry observations can help restore the desired sharp image or video. Solutions for blind deconvolution based on neural networks rely on a massive amount of ground-truth data which is hard to acquire. In this work, we propose an efficient approach to produce a significant amount of realistic training data and introduce a novel recurrent network architecture to deblur frames taking temporal information into account, which can efficiently handle arbitrary spatial and temporal input sizes. We demonstrate the versatility of our approach in a comprehensive comparison on a number of challening real-world examples.Comment: International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) (2017