Learning to Deblur Images with Exemplars
This work addresses the specific challenge of deblurring blurry face images for applications in computer vision, representing an incremental improvement by focusing on a domain-specific object class.
The paper tackles the problem of deblurring face images, which existing methods handle poorly due to limited edge information, by exploiting facial structures and using an exemplar dataset and a convolutional neural network to restore sharp edges, resulting in effective deblurring as demonstrated in experiments against state-of-the-art methods.
Human faces are one interesting object class with numerous applications. While significant progress has been made in the generic deblurring problem, existing methods are less effective for blurry face images. The success of the state-of-the-art image deblurring algorithms stems mainly from implicit or explicit restoration of salient edges for kernel estimation. However, existing methods are less effective as only few edges can be restored from blurry face images for kernel estimation. In this paper, we address the problem of deblurring face images by exploiting facial structures. We propose a deblurring algorithm based on an exemplar dataset without using coarse-to-fine strategies or heuristic edge selections. In addition, we develop a convolutional neural network to restore sharp edges from blurry images for deblurring. Extensive experiments against the state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms for deblurring face images. In addition, we show the proposed algorithms can be applied to image deblurring for other object classes.