Rethinking Coarse-to-Fine Approach in Single Image Deblurring
This work addresses efficiency and accuracy in image deblurring for computer vision applications, presenting an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the high computational cost of coarse-to-fine strategies in single image deblurring by proposing MIMO-UNet, a multi-input multi-output U-net that achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and reduced complexity on GoPro and RealBlur datasets.
Coarse-to-fine strategies have been extensively used for the architecture design of single image deblurring networks. Conventional methods typically stack sub-networks with multi-scale input images and gradually improve sharpness of images from the bottom sub-network to the top sub-network, yielding inevitably high computational costs. Toward a fast and accurate deblurring network design, we revisit the coarse-to-fine strategy and present a multi-input multi-output U-net (MIMO-UNet). The MIMO-UNet has three distinct features. First, the single encoder of the MIMO-UNet takes multi-scale input images to ease the difficulty of training. Second, the single decoder of the MIMO-UNet outputs multiple deblurred images with different scales to mimic multi-cascaded U-nets using a single U-shaped network. Last, asymmetric feature fusion is introduced to merge multi-scale features in an efficient manner. Extensive experiments on the GoPro and RealBlur datasets demonstrate that the proposed network outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and computational complexity. Source code is available for research purposes at https://github.com/chosj95/MIMO-UNet.