Blind Deblurring Using Internal Patch Recurrence

Abstract

Recurrence of small image patches across different scales of a natural image has been previously used for solving ill-posed problems (e.g. super- resolution from a single image). In this paper we show how this multi-scale property can also be used for “blind-deblurring”, namely, removal of an unknown blur from a blurry image. While patches repeat ‘as is’ across scales in a sharp natural image, this cross-scale recurrence significantly diminishes in blurry images. We exploit these deviations from ideal patch recurrence as a cue for recovering the underlying (unknown) blur kernel. More specifically, we look for the blur kernel  k , such that if its effect is “undone” (if the blurry image is deconvolved with  k ), the patch similarity across scales of the image will be maximized. We report extensive experimental evaluations, which indicate that our approach compares favorably to state-of-the-art blind deblurring methods, and in particular, is more robust than them.