Convolutional Deblurring for Natural Imaging

In this paper, we propose a novel design of image deblurring in the form of one-shot convolution filtering that can directly convolve with naturally blurred images for restoration. The problem of optical blurring is a common disadvantage to many imaging applications that suffer from optical imperfections. Despite numerous deconvolution methods that blindly estimate blurring in either inclusive or exclusive forms, they are practically challenging due to high computational cost and low image reconstruction quality. Both conditions of high accuracy and high speed are prerequisites for high-throughput imaging platforms in digital archiving. In such platforms, deblurring is required after image acquisition before being stored, previewed, or processed for high-level interpretation. Therefore, on-the-fly correction of such images is important to avoid possible time delays, mitigate computational expenses, and increase image perception quality. We bridge this gap by synthesizing a deconvolution kernel as a linear combination of Finite Impulse Response (FIR) even-derivative filters that can be directly convolved with blurry input images to boost the frequency fall-off of the Point Spread Function (PSF) associated with the optical blur. We employ a Gaussian low-pass filter to decouple the image denoising problem for image edge deblurring. Furthermore, we propose a blind approach to estimate the PSF statistics for two Gaussian and Laplacian models that are common in many imaging pipelines. Thorough experiments are designed to test and validate the efficiency of the proposed method using 2054 naturally blurred images across six imaging applications and seven state-of-the-art deconvolution methods.Comment: 15 pages, for publication in IEEE Transaction Image Processin

Semi-MoreGAN: A New Semi-supervised Generative Adversarial Network for Mixture of Rain Removal

Rain is one of the most common weather which can completely degrade the image quality and interfere with the performance of many computer vision tasks, especially under heavy rain conditions. We observe that: (i) rain is a mixture of rain streaks and rainy haze; (ii) the scene depth determines the intensity of rain streaks and the transformation into the rainy haze; (iii) most existing deraining methods are only trained on synthetic rainy images, and hence generalize poorly to the real-world scenes. Motivated by these observations, we propose a new SEMI-supervised Mixture Of rain REmoval Generative Adversarial Network (Semi-MoreGAN), which consists of four key modules: (I) a novel attentional depth prediction network to provide precise depth estimation; (ii) a context feature prediction network composed of several well-designed detailed residual blocks to produce detailed image context features; (iii) a pyramid depth-guided non-local network to effectively integrate the image context with the depth information, and produce the final rain-free images; and (iv) a comprehensive semi-supervised loss function to make the model not limited to synthetic datasets but generalize smoothly to real-world heavy rainy scenes. Extensive experiments show clear improvements of our approach over twenty representative state-of-the-arts on both synthetic and real-world rainy images.Comment: 18 page