Learning a Discriminative Prior for Blind Image Deblurring

Abstract

We present an effective blind image deblurring method based on a data-driven discriminative prior. Our work is motivated by the fact that a good image prior should favor clear images over blurred images. To obtain such an image prior for deblurring, we formulate the image prior as a binary classifier which can be achieved by a deep convolutional neural network (CNN). The learned image prior has a significant discriminative property and is able to distinguish whether the image is clear or not. Embedded into the maximum a posterior (MAP) framework, it helps blind deblurring on various scenarios, including natural, face, text, and low-illumination images. However, it is difficult to optimize the deblurring method with the learned image prior as it involves a non-linear CNN. Therefore, we develop an efficient numerical approach based on the half-quadratic splitting method and gradient decent algorithm to solve the proposed model. Furthermore, the proposed model can be easily extended to non-uniform deblurring. Both qualitative and quantitative experimental results show that our method performs favorably against state-of-the-art algorithms as well as domain-specific image deblurring approaches.