Recent Progress in Image Deblurring

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, image deblurring has attracted growing attention in recent years. From the viewpoint of how to handle the ill-posedness which is a crucial issue in deblurring tasks, existing methods can be grouped into five categories: Bayesian inference framework, variational methods, sparse representation-based methods, homography-based modeling, and region-based methods. In spite of achieving a certain level of development, image deblurring, especially the blind case, is limited in its success by complex application conditions which make the blur kernel hard to obtain and be spatially variant. We provide a holistic understanding and deep insight into image deblurring in this review. An analysis of the empirical evidence for representative methods, practical issues, as well as a discussion of promising future directions are also presented.Comment: 53 pages, 17 figure

Recent Progress in Image Deblurring

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, image deblurring has attracted growing attention in recent years. From the viewpoint of how to handle the ill-posedness which is a crucial issue in deblurring tasks, existing methods can be grouped into five categories: Bayesian inference framework, variational methods, sparse representation-based methods, homography-based modeling, and region-based methods. In spite of achieving a certain level of development, image deblurring, especially the blind case, is limited in its success by complex application conditions which make the blur kernel hard to obtain and be spatially variant. We provide a holistic understanding and deep insight into image deblurring in this review. An analysis of the empirical evidence for representative methods, practical issues, as well as a discussion of promising future directions are also presented

Learnable Blur Kernel for Single-Image Defocus Deblurring in the Wild

Recent research showed that the dual-pixel sensor has made great progress in defocus map estimation and image defocus deblurring. However, extracting real-time dual-pixel views is troublesome and complex in algorithm deployment. Moreover, the deblurred image generated by the defocus deblurring network lacks high-frequency details, which is unsatisfactory in human perception. To overcome this issue, we propose a novel defocus deblurring method that uses the guidance of the defocus map to implement image deblurring. The proposed method consists of a learnable blur kernel to estimate the defocus map, which is an unsupervised method, and a single-image defocus deblurring generative adversarial network (DefocusGAN) for the first time. The proposed network can learn the deblurring of different regions and recover realistic details. We propose a defocus adversarial loss to guide this training process. Competitive experimental results confirm that with a learnable blur kernel, the generated defocus map can achieve results comparable to supervised methods. In the single-image defocus deblurring task, the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results, especially significant improvements in perceptual quality, where PSNR reaches 25.56 dB and LPIPS reaches 0.111.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure

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

Variant-Depth Neural Networks for Deblurring Traffic Images in Intelligent Transportation Systems

Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) with surveillance cameras capture traffic images or videos. However, images or videos in ITS often encounter blurs due to various reasons. Considering resource limitations, although recent technologies make progress in image-deblurring, there are still challenges in applying image-deblurring models in practical transportation systems: the model size and the running time. This work proposes an artful variant-depth network (VDN) to address the challenges. We design variant-depth sub-networks in a coarse-to-fine manner to improve the deblurring effect. We also adopt a new connection namely stack connection to connect all sub-networks to reduce the running time and model size while maintaining high deblurring quality. We evaluate the proposed VDN with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on several typical datasets. Results on Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) show that the VDN outperforms SOTA image-deblurring methods. Furthermore, the VDN also has the shortest running time and the smallest model size

Distributed Deblurring of Large Images of Wide Field-Of-View

Image deblurring is an economic way to reduce certain degradations (blur and noise) in acquired images. Thus, it has become essential tool in high resolution imaging in many applications, e.g., astronomy, microscopy or computational photography. In applications such as astronomy and satellite imaging, the size of acquired images can be extremely large (up to gigapixels) covering wide field-of-view suffering from shift-variant blur. Most of the existing image deblurring techniques are designed and implemented to work efficiently on centralized computing system having multiple processors and a shared memory. Thus, the largest image that can be handle is limited by the size of the physical memory available on the system. In this paper, we propose a distributed nonblind image deblurring algorithm in which several connected processing nodes (with reasonable computational resources) process simultaneously different portions of a large image while maintaining certain coherency among them to finally obtain a single crisp image. Unlike the existing centralized techniques, image deblurring in distributed fashion raises several issues. To tackle these issues, we consider certain approximations that trade-offs between the quality of deblurred image and the computational resources required to achieve it. The experimental results show that our algorithm produces the similar quality of images as the existing centralized techniques while allowing distribution, and thus being cost effective for extremely large images.Comment: 16 pages, 10 figures, submitted to IEEE Trans. on Image Processin