Tae Hyun Kim

Muhammad Kashif Ali, Dongjin Kim, Tae Hyun Kim

In many video restoration/translation tasks, image processing operations are naïvely extended to the video domain by processing each frame independently, disregarding the temporal connection of the video frames. This disregard for the temporal connection often leads to severe temporal inconsistencies. State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) techniques that address these inconsistencies rely on the availability of unprocessed videos to implicitly siphon and utilize consistent video dynamics to restore the temporal consistency of frame-wise processed videos which often jeopardizes the translation effect. We propose a general framework for this task that learns to infer and utilize consistent motion dynamics from inconsistent videos to mitigate the temporal flicker while preserving the perceptual quality for both the temporally neighboring and relatively distant frames without requiring the raw videos at test time. The proposed framework produces SOTA results on two benchmark datasets, DAVIS and videvo.net, processed by numerous image processing applications. The code and the trained models are available at \url{https://github.com/MKashifAli/TARONVD}.

Jinsu Yoo, Taehoon Kim, Sihaeng Lee et al.

Recent transformer-based super-resolution (SR) methods have achieved promising results against conventional CNN-based methods. However, these approaches suffer from essential shortsightedness created by only utilizing the standard self-attention-based reasoning. In this paper, we introduce an effective hybrid SR network to aggregate enriched features, including local features from CNNs and long-range multi-scale dependencies captured by transformers. Specifically, our network comprises transformer and convolutional branches, which synergetically complement each representation during the restoration procedure. Furthermore, we propose a cross-scale token attention module, allowing the transformer branch to exploit the informative relationships among tokens across different scales efficiently. Our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art SR results on numerous benchmark datasets.

Seunghwan Lee, Tae Hyun Kim

Deep image denoising networks have achieved impressive success with the help of a considerably large number of synthetic train datasets. However, real-world denoising is a still challenging problem due to the dissimilarity between distributions of real and synthetic noisy datasets. Although several real-world noisy datasets have been presented, the number of train datasets (i.e., pairs of clean and real noisy images) is limited, and acquiring more real noise datasets is laborious and expensive. To mitigate this problem, numerous attempts to simulate real noise models using generative models have been studied. Nevertheless, previous works had to train multiple networks to handle multiple different noise distributions. By contrast, we propose a new generative model that can synthesize noisy images with multiple different noise distributions. Specifically, we adopt recent contrastive learning to learn distinguishable latent features of the noise. Moreover, our model can generate new noisy images by transferring the noise characteristics solely from a single reference noisy image. We demonstrate the accuracy and the effectiveness of our noise model for both known and unknown noise removal.

Changjin Kim, Tae Hyun Kim, Sungyong Baik

Removing noise from images, a.k.a image denoising, can be a very challenging task since the type and amount of noise can greatly vary for each image due to many factors including a camera model and capturing environments. While there have been striking improvements in image denoising with the emergence of advanced deep learning architectures and real-world datasets, recent denoising networks struggle to maintain performance on images with noise that has not been seen during training. One typical approach to address the challenge would be to adapt a denoising network to new noise distribution. Instead, in this work, we shift our focus to adapting the input noise itself, rather than adapting a network. Thus, we keep a pretrained network frozen, and adapt an input noise to capture the fine-grained deviations. As such, we propose a new denoising algorithm, dubbed Learning-to-Adapt-Noise (LAN), where a learnable noise offset is directly added to a given noisy image to bring a given input noise closer towards the noise distribution a denoising network is trained to handle. Consequently, the proposed framework exhibits performance improvement on images with unseen noise, displaying the potential of the proposed research direction. The code is available at https://github.com/chjinny/LAN

Xiaojiao Xiao, Qinmin Vivian Hu, Tae Hyun Kim et al.

Liver tumor segmentation, dynamic enhancement regression, and classification are critical for clinical assessment and diagnosis. However, no prior work has attempted to achieve these tasks simultaneously in an end-to-end framework, primarily due to the lack of an effective framework that captures inter-task relevance for mutual improvement and the absence of a mechanism to extract dynamic MRI information effectively. To address these challenges, we propose the Multi-Task Interaction adversarial learning Network (MTI-Net), a novel integrated framework designed to tackle these tasks simultaneously. MTI-Net incorporates Multi-domain Information Entropy Fusion (MdIEF), which utilizes entropy-aware, high-frequency spectral information to effectively integrate features from both frequency and spectral domains, enhancing the extraction and utilization of dynamic MRI data. The network also introduces a task interaction module that establishes higher-order consistency between segmentation and regression, thus fostering inter-task synergy and improving overall performance. Additionally, we designed a novel task-driven discriminator (TDD) to capture internal high-order relationships between tasks. For dynamic MRI information extraction, we employ a shallow Transformer network to perform positional encoding, which captures the relationships within dynamic MRI sequences. In experiments on a dataset of 238 subjects, MTI-Net demonstrates high performance across multiple tasks, indicating its strong potential for assisting in the clinical assessment of liver tumors. The code is available at: https://github.com/xiaojiao929/MTI-Net.

Hyeonjae Kim, Dongjin Kim, Eugene Jin et al.

While deep learning-based super-resolution (SR) methods have shown impressive outcomes with synthetic degradation scenarios such as bicubic downsampling, they frequently struggle to perform well on real-world images that feature complex, nonlinear degradations like noise, blur, and compression artifacts. Recent efforts to address this issue have involved the painstaking compilation of real low-resolution (LR) and high-resolution (HR) image pairs, usually limited to several specific downscaling factors. To address these challenges, our work introduces a novel framework capable of synthesizing authentic LR images from a single HR image by leveraging the latent degradation space with flow matching. Our approach generates LR images with realistic artifacts at unseen degradation levels, which facilitates the creation of large-scale, real-world SR training datasets. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative assessments verify that our synthetic LR images accurately replicate real-world degradations. Furthermore, both traditional and arbitrary-scale SR models trained using our datasets consistently yield much better HR outcomes.

Young Jae Oh, Jihun Kim, Jihoon Nam et al.

Arbitrary-scale image super-resolution employing implicit neural functions has gained significant attention lately due to its capability to upscale images across diverse scales utilizing only a single model. Nevertheless, these methodologies have imposed substantial computational demands as they involve querying every target pixel to a single resource-intensive decoder. In this paper, we introduce a novel and efficient framework, the Mixture-of-Experts Implicit Super-Resolution (MoEISR), which enables super-resolution at arbitrary scales with significantly increased computational efficiency without sacrificing reconstruction quality. MoEISR dynamically allocates the most suitable decoding expert to each pixel using a lightweight mapper module, allowing experts with varying capacities to reconstruct pixels across regions with diverse complexities. Our experiments demonstrate that MoEISR successfully reduces significant amount of floating point operations (FLOPs) while delivering comparable or superior peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR).

Muhammad Kashif Ali, Eun Woo Im, Dongjin Kim et al.

Video stabilization is a longstanding computer vision problem, particularly pixel-level synthesis solutions for video stabilization which synthesize full frames add to the complexity of this task. These techniques aim to stabilize videos by synthesizing full frames while enhancing the stability of the considered video. This intensifies the complexity of the task due to the distinct mix of unique motion profiles and visual content present in each video sequence, making robust generalization with fixed parameters difficult. In our study, we introduce a novel approach to enhance the performance of pixel-level synthesis solutions for video stabilization by adapting these models to individual input video sequences. The proposed adaptation exploits low-level visual cues accessible during test-time to improve both the stability and quality of resulting videos. We highlight the efficacy of our methodology of "test-time adaptation" through simple fine-tuning of one of these models, followed by significant stability gain via the integration of meta-learning techniques. Notably, significant improvement is achieved with only a single adaptation step. The versatility of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated by consistently improving the performance of various pixel-level synthesis models for video stabilization in real-world scenarios.

Eun Woo Im, Junsung Shin, Sungyong Baik et al.

Relying on the representation power of neural networks, most recent works have often neglected several factors involved in haze degradation, such as transmission (the amount of light reaching an observer from a scene over distance) and atmospheric light. These factors are generally unknown, making dehazing problems ill-posed and creating inherent uncertainties. To account for such uncertainties and factors involved in haze degradation, we introduce a variational Bayesian framework for single image dehazing. We propose to take not only a clean image and but also transmission map as latent variables, the posterior distributions of which are parameterized by corresponding neural networks: dehazing and transmission networks, respectively. Based on a physical model for haze degradation, our variational Bayesian framework leads to a new objective function that encourages the cooperation between them, facilitating the joint training of and thereby boosting the performance of each other. In our framework, a dehazing network can estimate a clean image independently of a transmission map estimation during inference, introducing no overhead. Furthermore, our model-agnostic framework can be seamlessly incorporated with other existing dehazing networks, greatly enhancing the performance consistently across datasets and models.

Muhammad Kashif Ali, Eun Woo Im, Dongjin Kim et al.

Video stabilization remains a fundamental problem in computer vision, particularly pixel-level synthesis solutions for video stabilization, which synthesize full-frame outputs, add to the complexity of this task. These methods aim to enhance stability while synthesizing full-frame videos, but the inherent diversity in motion profiles and visual content present in each video sequence makes robust generalization with fixed parameters difficult. To address this, we present a novel method that improves pixel-level synthesis video stabilization methods by rapidly adapting models to each input video at test time. The proposed approach takes advantage of low-level visual cues available during inference to improve both the stability and visual quality of the output. Notably, the proposed rapid adaptation achieves significant performance gains even with a single adaptation pass. We further propose a jerk localization module and a targeted adaptation strategy, which focuses the adaptation on high-jerk segments for maximizing stability with fewer adaptation steps. The proposed methodology enables modern stabilizers to overcome the longstanding SOTA approaches while maintaining the full frame nature of the modern methods, while offering users with control mechanisms akin to classical approaches. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world datasets demonstrate the versatility of the proposed method. Our approach consistently improves the performance of various full-frame synthesis models in both qualitative and quantitative terms, including results on downstream applications.

Daehyun Kim, Youngmin Kim, Yoon Ju Oh et al.

Under-display cameras (UDCs) allow for full-screen designs by positioning the imaging sensor underneath the display. Nonetheless, light diffraction and scattering through the various display layers result in spatially varying and complex degradations, which significantly reduce high-frequency details. Current PSF-based physical modeling techniques and frequency-separation networks are effective at reconstructing low-frequency structures and maintaining overall color consistency. However, they still face challenges in recovering fine details when dealing with complex, spatially varying degradation. To solve this problem, we propose a lightweight \textbf{U}ncertainty-aware \textbf{C}ontext-\textbf{M}emory \textbf{Network} (\textbf{UCMNet}), for UDC image restoration. Unlike previous methods that apply uniform restoration, UCMNet performs uncertainty-aware adaptive processing to restore high-frequency details in regions with varying degradations. The estimated uncertainty maps, learned through an uncertainty-driven loss, quantify spatial uncertainty induced by diffraction and scattering, and guide the Memory Bank to retrieve region-adaptive context from the Context Bank. This process enables effective modeling of the non-uniform degradation characteristics inherent to UDC imaging. Leveraging this uncertainty as a prior, UCMNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks with 30\% fewer parameters than previous models. Project page: \href{https://kdhrick2222.github.io/projects/UCMNet/}{https://kdhrick2222.github.io/projects/UCMNet}.

Jaekyun Ko, Dongjin Kim, Soomin Lee et al.

Denoising in the sRGB image space is challenging due to noise variability. Although end-to-end methods perform well, their effectiveness in real-world scenarios is limited by the scarcity of real noisy-clean image pairs, which are expensive and difficult to collect. To address this limitation, several generative methods have been developed to synthesize realistic noisy images from limited data. These generative approaches often rely on camera metadata during both training and testing to synthesize real-world noise. However, the lack of metadata or inconsistencies between devices restricts their usability. Therefore, we propose a novel framework called Prompt-Driven Noise Generation (PNG). This model is capable of acquiring high-dimensional prompt features that capture the characteristics of real-world input noise and creating a variety of realistic noisy images consistent with the distribution of the input noise. By eliminating the dependency on explicit camera metadata, our approach significantly enhances the generalizability and applicability of noise synthesis. Comprehensive experiments reveal that our model effectively produces realistic noisy images and show the successful application of these generated images in removing real-world noise across various benchmark datasets.

Junseong Shin, Seungwoo Chung, Yunjeong Yang et al.

Dehazing involves removing haze or fog from images to restore clarity and improve visibility by estimating atmospheric scattering effects. While deep learning methods show promise, the lack of paired real-world training data and the resulting domain gap hinder generalization to real-world scenarios. In this context, physics-grounded learning becomes crucial; however, traditional methods based on the Atmospheric Scattering Model (ASM) often fall short in handling real-world complexities and diverse haze patterns. To solve this problem, we propose HazeFlow, a novel ODE-based framework that reformulates ASM as an ordinary differential equation (ODE). Inspired by Rectified Flow (RF), HazeFlow learns an optimal ODE trajectory to map hazy images to clean ones, enhancing real-world dehazing performance with only a single inference step. Additionally, we introduce a non-homogeneous haze generation method using Markov Chain Brownian Motion (MCBM) to address the scarcity of paired real-world data. By simulating realistic haze patterns through MCBM, we enhance the adaptability of HazeFlow to diverse real-world scenarios. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that HazeFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance across various real-world dehazing benchmark datasets.

Dongjin Kim, Jaekyun Ko, Muhammad Kashif Ali et al.

Image denoising is a fundamental challenge in computer vision, with applications in photography and medical imaging. While deep learning-based methods have shown remarkable success, their reliance on specific noise distributions limits generalization to unseen noise types and levels. Existing approaches attempt to address this with extensive training data and high computational resources but they still suffer from overfitting. To address these issues, we conduct image denoising by utilizing dynamically generated kernels via efficient operations. This approach helps prevent overfitting and improves resilience to unseen noise. Specifically, our method leverages a Feature Extraction Module for robust noise-invariant features, Global Statistics and Local Correlation Modules to capture comprehensive noise characteristics and structural correlations. The Kernel Prediction Module then employs these cues to produce pixel-wise varying kernels adapted to local structures, which are then applied iteratively for denoising. This ensures both efficiency and superior restoration quality. Despite being trained on single-level Gaussian noise, our compact model (~ 0.04 M) excels across diverse noise types and levels, demonstrating the promise of iterative dynamic filtering for practical image denoising.

Eunhye Lee, Jeongmu Kim, Jisu Kim et al.

Recent image inpainting methods have shown promising results due to the power of deep learning, which can explore external information available from the large training dataset. However, many state-of-the-art inpainting networks are still limited in exploiting internal information available in the given input image at test time. To mitigate this problem, we present a novel and efficient self-supervised fine-tuning algorithm that can adapt the parameters of fully pre-trained inpainting networks without using ground-truth target images. We update the parameters of the pre-trained state-of-the-art inpainting networks by utilizing existing self-similar patches (i.e., self-exemplars) within the given input image without changing the network architecture and improve the inpainting quality by a large margin. Qualitative and quantitative experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm, and we achieve state-of-the-art inpainting results on publicly available benchmark datasets.

Jinsu Yoo, Tae Hyun Kim

Recent single-image super-resolution (SISR) networks, which can adapt their network parameters to specific input images, have shown promising results by exploiting the information available within the input data as well as large external datasets. However, the extension of these self-supervised SISR approaches to video handling has yet to be studied. Thus, we present a new learning algorithm that allows conventional video super-resolution (VSR) networks to adapt their parameters to test video frames without using the ground-truth datasets. By utilizing many self-similar patches across space and time, we improve the performance of fully pre-trained VSR networks and produce temporally consistent video frames. Moreover, we present a test-time knowledge distillation technique that accelerates the adaptation speed with less hardware resources. In our experiments, we demonstrate that our novel learning algorithm can fine-tune state-of-the-art VSR networks and substantially elevate performance on numerous benchmark datasets.

Eunhye Lee, Jeongmu Kim, Jisu Kim et al.

Recent image inpainting methods show promising results due to the power of deep learning, which can explore external information available from a large training dataset. However, many state-of-the-art inpainting networks are still limited in exploiting internal information available in the given input image at test time. To mitigate this problem, we present a novel and efficient self-supervised fine-tuning algorithm that can adapt the parameters of fully pre-trained inpainting networks without using ground-truth target images. We update the parameters of the pre-trained state-of-the-art inpainting networks by utilizing existing self-similar patches within the given input image without changing network architecture and improve the inpainting quality by a large margin. Qualitative and quantitative experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm, and we achieve state-of-the-art inpainting results on publicly available numerous benchmark datasets.

Seobin Park, Tae Hyun Kim

We propose a new approach for the image super-resolution (SR) task that progressively restores a high-resolution (HR) image from an input low-resolution (LR) image on the basis of a neural ordinary differential equation. In particular, we newly formulate the SR problem as an initial value problem, where the initial value is the input LR image. Unlike conventional progressive SR methods that perform gradual updates using straightforward iterative mechanisms, our SR process is formulated in a concrete manner based on explicit modeling with a much clearer understanding. Our method can be easily implemented using conventional neural networks for image restoration. Moreover, the proposed method can super-resolve an image with arbitrary scale factors on continuous domain, and achieves superior SR performance over state-of-the-art SR methods.

Muhammad Kashif Ali, Sangjoon Yu, Tae Hyun Kim

Despite the advances in the field of generative models in computer vision, video stabilization still lacks a pure regressive deep-learning-based formulation. Deep video stabilization is generally formulated with the help of explicit motion estimation modules due to the lack of a dataset containing pairs of videos with similar perspective but different motion. Therefore, the deep learning approaches for this task have difficulties in the pixel-level synthesis of latent stabilized frames, and resort to motion estimation modules for indirect transformations of the unstable frames to stabilized frames, leading to the loss of visual content near the frame boundaries. In this work, we aim to declutter this over-complicated formulation of video stabilization with the help of a novel dataset that contains pairs of training videos with similar perspective but different motion, and verify its effectiveness by successfully learning motion blind full-frame video stabilization through employing strictly conventional generative techniques and further improve the stability through a curriculum-learning inspired adversarial training strategy. Through extensive experimentation, we show the quantitative and qualitative advantages of the proposed approach to the state-of-the-art video stabilization approaches. Moreover, our method achieves $\sim3\times$ speed-up over the currently available fastest video stabilization methods.

Myungsub Choi, Janghoon Choi, Sungyong Baik et al.

Video frame interpolation is a challenging problem because there are different scenarios for each video depending on the variety of foreground and background motion, frame rate, and occlusion. It is therefore difficult for a single network with fixed parameters to generalize across different videos. Ideally, one could have a different network for each scenario, but this is computationally infeasible for practical applications. In this work, we propose to adapt the model to each video by making use of additional information that is readily available at test time and yet has not been exploited in previous works. We first show the benefits of `test-time adaptation' through simple fine-tuning of a network, then we greatly improve its efficiency by incorporating meta-learning. We obtain significant performance gains with only a single gradient update without any additional parameters. Finally, we show that our meta-learning framework can be easily employed to any video frame interpolation network and can consistently improve its performance on multiple benchmark datasets.

Seunghwan Lee, Donghyeon Cho, Jiwon Kim et al.

In this study, we propose a self-supervised video denoising method called "restore-from-restored." This method fine-tunes a pre-trained network by using a pseudo clean video during the test phase. The pseudo clean video is obtained by applying a noisy video to the baseline network. By adopting a fully convolutional neural network (FCN) as the baseline, we can improve video denoising performance without accurate optical flow estimation and registration steps, in contrast to many conventional video restoration methods, due to the translation equivariant property of the FCN. Specifically, the proposed method can take advantage of plentiful similar patches existing across multiple consecutive frames (i.e., patch-recurrence); these patches can boost the performance of the baseline network by a large margin. We analyze the restoration performance of the fine-tuned video denoising networks with the proposed self-supervision-based learning algorithm, and demonstrate that the FCN can utilize recurring patches without requiring accurate registration among adjacent frames. In our experiments, we apply the proposed method to state-of-the-art denoisers and show that our fine-tuned networks achieve a considerable improvement in denoising performance.

Seunghwan Lee, Dongkyu Lee, Donghyeon Cho et al.

In this study, we propose a simple and effective fine-tuning algorithm called "restore-from-restored", which can greatly enhance the performance of fully pre-trained image denoising networks. Many supervised denoising approaches can produce satisfactory results using large external training datasets. However, these methods have limitations in using internal information available in a given test image. By contrast, recent self-supervised approaches can remove noise in the input image by utilizing information from the specific test input. However, such methods show relatively lower performance on known noise types such as Gaussian noise compared to supervised methods. Thus, to combine external and internal information, we fine-tune the fully pre-trained denoiser using pseudo training set at test time. By exploiting internal self-similar patches (i.e., patch-recurrence), the baseline network can be adapted to the given specific input image. We demonstrate that our method can be easily employed on top of the state-of-the-art denoising networks and further improve the performance on numerous denoising benchmark datasets including real noisy images.

Seobin Park, Jinsu Yoo, Donghyeon Cho et al.

Conventional supervised super-resolution (SR) approaches are trained with massive external SR datasets but fail to exploit desirable properties of the given test image. On the other hand, self-supervised SR approaches utilize the internal information within a test image but suffer from computational complexity in run-time. In this work, we observe the opportunity for further improvement of the performance of SISR without changing the architecture of conventional SR networks by practically exploiting additional information given from the input image. In the training stage, we train the network via meta-learning; thus, the network can quickly adapt to any input image at test time. Then, in the test stage, parameters of this meta-learned network are rapidly fine-tuned with only a few iterations by only using the given low-resolution image. The adaptation at the test time takes full advantage of patch-recurrence property observed in natural images. Our method effectively handles unknown SR kernels and can be applied to any existing model. We demonstrate that the proposed model-agnostic approach consistently improves the performance of conventional SR networks on various benchmark SR datasets.

Seunghwan Lee, Donghyeon Cho, Jiwon Kim et al.

Under certain statistical assumptions of noise, recent self-supervised approaches for denoising have been introduced to learn network parameters without true clean images, and these methods can restore an image by exploiting information available from the given input (i.e., internal statistics) at test time. However, self-supervised methods are not yet combined with conventional supervised denoising methods which train the denoising networks with a large number of external training samples. Thus, we propose a new denoising approach that can greatly outperform the state-of-the-art supervised denoising methods by adapting their network parameters to the given input through selfsupervision without changing the networks architectures. Moreover, we propose a meta-learning algorithm to enable quick adaptation of parameters to the specific input at test time. We demonstrate that the proposed method can be easily employed with state-of-the-art denoising networks without additional parameters, and achieve state-of-the-art performance on numerous benchmark datasets.

Jonathan Samuel Lumentut, Tae Hyun Kim, Ravi Ramamoorthi et al.

Restoring a sharp light field image from its blurry input has become essential due to the increasing popularity of parallax-based image processing. State-of-the-art blind light field deblurring methods suffer from several issues such as slow processing, reduced spatial size, and a limited motion blur model. In this work, we address these challenging problems by generating a complex blurry light field dataset and proposing a learning-based deblurring approach. In particular, we model the full 6-degree of freedom (6-DOF) light field camera motion, which is used to create the blurry dataset using a combination of real light fields captured with a Lytro Illum camera, and synthetic light field renderings of 3D scenes. Furthermore, we propose a light field deblurring network that is built with the capability of large receptive fields. We also introduce a simple strategy of angular sampling to train on the large-scale blurry light field effectively. We evaluate our method through both quantitative and qualitative measurements and demonstrate superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art method with a massive speedup in execution time. Our method is about 16K times faster than Srinivasan et. al. [22] and can deblur a full-resolution light field in less than 2 seconds.

Tae Hyun Kim, Kyoung Mu Lee, Bernhard Schölkopf et al.

State-of-the-art video deblurring methods are capable of removing non-uniform blur caused by unwanted camera shake and/or object motion in dynamic scenes. However, most existing methods are based on batch processing and thus need access to all recorded frames, rendering them computationally demanding and time consuming and thus limiting their practical use. In contrast, we propose an online (sequential) video deblurring method based on a spatio-temporal recurrent network that allows for real-time performance. In particular, we introduce a novel architecture which extends the receptive field while keeping the overall size of the network small to enable fast execution. In doing so, our network is able to remove even large blur caused by strong camera shake and/or fast moving objects. Furthermore, we propose a novel network layer that enforces temporal consistency between consecutive frames by dynamic temporal blending which compares and adaptively (at test time) shares features obtained at different time steps. We show the superiority of the proposed method in an extensive experimental evaluation.

Seungjun Nah, Tae Hyun Kim, Kyoung Mu Lee

Non-uniform blind deblurring for general dynamic scenes is a challenging computer vision problem as blurs arise not only from multiple object motions but also from camera shake, scene depth variation. To remove these complicated motion blurs, conventional energy optimization based methods rely on simple assumptions such that blur kernel is partially uniform or locally linear. Moreover, recent machine learning based methods also depend on synthetic blur datasets generated under these assumptions. This makes conventional deblurring methods fail to remove blurs where blur kernel is difficult to approximate or parameterize (e.g. object motion boundaries). In this work, we propose a multi-scale convolutional neural network that restores sharp images in an end-to-end manner where blur is caused by various sources. Together, we present multi-scale loss function that mimics conventional coarse-to-fine approaches. Furthermore, we propose a new large-scale dataset that provides pairs of realistic blurry image and the corresponding ground truth sharp image that are obtained by a high-speed camera. With the proposed model trained on this dataset, we demonstrate empirically that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance in dynamic scene deblurring not only qualitatively, but also quantitatively.

Byeongjoo Ahn, Tae Hyun Kim, Wonsik Kim et al.

We present a deblurring method for scenes with occluding objects using a carefully designed layered blur model. Layered blur model is frequently used in the motion deblurring problem to handle locally varying blurs, which is caused by object motions or depth variations in a scene. However, conventional models have a limitation in representing the layer interactions occurring at occlusion boundaries. In this paper, we address this limitation in both theoretical and experimental ways, and propose a new layered blur model reflecting actual blur generation process. Based on this model, we develop an occlusion-aware deblurring method that can estimate not only the clear foreground and background, but also the object motion more accurately. We also provide a novel analysis on the blur kernel at object boundaries, which shows the distinctive characteristics of the blur kernel that cannot be captured by conventional blur models. Experimental results on synthetic and real blurred videos demonstrate that the proposed method yields superior results, especially at object boundaries.

Tae Hyun Kim, Seungjun Nah, Kyoung Mu Lee

State-of-the-art video deblurring methods cannot handle blurry videos recorded in dynamic scenes, since they are built under a strong assumption that the captured scenes are static. Contrary to the existing methods, we propose a video deblurring algorithm that can deal with general blurs inherent in dynamic scenes. To handle general and locally varying blurs caused by various sources, such as moving objects, camera shake, depth variation, and defocus, we estimate pixel-wise non-uniform blur kernels. We infer bidirectional optical flows to handle motion blurs, and also estimate Gaussian blur maps to remove optical blur from defocus in our new blur model. Therefore, we propose a single energy model that jointly estimates optical flows, defocus blur maps and latent frames. We also provide a framework and efficient solvers to minimize the proposed energy model. By optimizing the energy model, we achieve significant improvements in removing general blurs, estimating optical flows, and extending depth-of-field in blurry frames. Moreover, in this work, to evaluate the performance of non-uniform deblurring methods objectively, we have constructed a new realistic dataset with ground truths. In addition, extensive experimental on publicly available challenging video data demonstrate that the proposed method produces qualitatively superior performance than the state-of-the-art methods which often fail in either deblurring or optical flow estimation.

Tae Hyun Kim, Kyoung Mu Lee

Several state-of-the-art video deblurring methods are based on a strong assumption that the captured scenes are static. These methods fail to deblur blurry videos in dynamic scenes. We propose a video deblurring method to deal with general blurs inherent in dynamic scenes, contrary to other methods. To handle locally varying and general blurs caused by various sources, such as camera shake, moving objects, and depth variation in a scene, we approximate pixel-wise kernel with bidirectional optical flows. Therefore, we propose a single energy model that simultaneously estimates optical flows and latent frames to solve our deblurring problem. We also provide a framework and efficient solvers to optimize the energy model. By minimizing the proposed energy function, we achieve significant improvements in removing blurs and estimating accurate optical flows in blurry frames. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in real and challenging videos that state-of-the-art methods fail in either deblurring or optical flow estimation.