Combinatorics

Pattern recognition (psychology)

Mathematics

Kernel (algebra)

Image (mathematics)

Statistics

Image restoration

Estimator

Artificial intelligence

Latent image

Deblurring

Computer science

Kernel density estimation

Computer vision

Image processing

IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence

Blind image deblurring is a conundrum because there are infinitely many pairs of latent image and blur kernel. To get a stable and reasonable deblurred image, proper prior knowledge of the latent image and the blur kernel is urgently required. Different from the recent works on the statistical observations of the difference between the blurred image and the clean one, our method is built on the surface-aware strategy arising from the intrinsic geometrical consideration. This approach facilitates the blur kernel estimation due to the preserved sharp edges in the intermediate latent image. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on deblurring the text and natural images. Moreover, our method can achieve attractive results in some challenging cases, such as low-illumination images with large saturated regions and impulse noise. A direct extension of our method to the non-uniform deblurring problem also validates the effectiveness of the surface-aware prior.

Surface-Aware Blind Image Deblurring