Multi-image Blind Deblurring Using a Coupled Adaptive Sparse Prior

Haichao Zhang, David Wipf, Yanning Zhang; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013, pp. 1051-1058

This paper presents a robust algorithm for estimating a single latent sharp image given multiple blurry and/or noisy observations. The underlying multi-image blind deconvolution problem is solved by linking all of the observations together via a Bayesian-inspired penalty function which couples the unknown latent image, blur kernels, and noise levels together in a unique way. This coupled penalty function enjoys a number of desirable properties, including a mechanism whereby the relative-concavity or shape is adapted as a function of the intrinsic quality of each blurry observation. In this way, higher quality observations may automatically contribute more to the final estimate than heavily degraded ones. The resulting algorithm, which requires no essential tuning parameters, can recover a high quality image from a set of observations containing potentially both blurry and noisy examples, without knowing a priori the degradation type of each observation. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world test images clearly demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method.