A Physics-Informed Blur Learning Framework for Imaging Systems

Abstract

Accurate blur estimation is essential for high-performance imaging across various applications. Blur is typically represented by the point spread function (PSF). In this paper, we propose a physics-informed PSF learning framework for imaging systems, consisting of a simple calibration followed by a learning process. Our framework could achieve both high accuracy and universal applicability. Inspired by the Seidel PSF model for representing spatially varying PSF, we identify its limitations in optimization and introduce a novel wavefront-based PSF model accompanied by an optimization strategy, both reducing optimization complexity and improving estimation accuracy. Moreover, our wavefront-based PSF model is independent of lens parameters, eliminate the need for prior knowledge of the lens. To validate our approach, we compare it with recent PSF estimation methods (Degradation Transfer and Fast Two-step) through a deblurring task, where all the estimated PSFs are used to train state-of-the-art deblurring algorithms. Our approach demonstrates improvements in image quality in simulation and also showcases noticeable visual quality improvements on real captured images.