Learning to Understand Image Blur

Shanghang Zhang, Xiaohui Shen, Zhe Lin, Radomír Měch, João P. Costeira, José M. F. Moura; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2018, pp. 6586-6595

Abstract


While many approaches have been proposed to estimate and remove blur in a photo, few efforts were made to have an algorithm automatically understand the blur desirability: whether the blur is desired or not, and how it affects the quality of the photo. Such a task not only relies on low-level visual features to identify blurry regions, but also requires high-level understanding of the image content as well as user intent during photo capture. In this paper, we propose a unified framework to estimate a spatially-varying blur map and understand its desirability in terms of image quality at the same time. In particular, we use a dilated fully convolutional neural network with pyramid pooling and boundary refinement layers to generate high-quality blur response maps. If blur exists, we classify its desirability to three levels ranging from good to bad, by distilling high-level semantics and learning an attention map to adaptively localize the important content in the image. The whole framework is end-to-end jointly trained with both supervisions of pixel-wise blur responses and image-wise blur desirability levels. Considering the limitations of existing image blur datasets, we collected a new large-scale dataset with both annotations to facilitate training. The proposed methods are extensively evaluated on two datasets and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on both tasks.

Related Material


[pdf] [supp]
[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Zhang_2018_CVPR,
author = {Zhang, Shanghang and Shen, Xiaohui and Lin, Zhe and Měch, Radomír and Costeira, João P. and Moura, José M. F.},
title = {Learning to Understand Image Blur},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
month = {June},
year = {2018}
}