Face Deblurring using Dual Camera Fusion on Mobile Phones

Motion blur of fast-moving subjects is a longstanding problem in photography and very common on mobile phones due to limited light collection efficiency, particularly in low-light conditions. While we have witnessed great progress in image deblurring in recent years, most methods require significant computational power and have limitations in processing high-resolution photos with severe local motions. To this end, we develop a novel face deblurring system based on the dual camera fusion technique for mobile phones. The system detects subject motion to dynamically enable a reference camera, e.g., ultrawide angle camera commonly available on recent premium phones, and captures an auxiliary photo with faster shutter settings. While the main shot is low noise but blurry, the reference shot is sharp but noisy. We learn ML models to align and fuse these two shots and output a clear photo without motion blur. Our algorithm runs efficiently on Google Pixel 6, which takes 463 ms overhead per shot. Our experiments demonstrate the advantage and robustness of our system against alternative single-image, multi-frame, face-specific, and video deblurring algorithms as well as commercial products. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first mobile solution for face motion deblurring that works reliably and robustly over thousands of images in diverse motion and lighting conditions.

Steadiface: Real-Time Face-Centric Stabilization on Mobile Phones

We present Steadiface, a new real-time face-centric video stabilization method that simultaneously removes hand shake and keeps subject's head stable. We use a CNN to estimate the face landmarks and use them to optimize a stabilized head center. We then formulate an optimization problem to find a virtual camera pose that locates the face to the stabilized head center while retains smooth rotation and translation transitions across frames. We test the proposed method on fieldtest videos and show it stabilizes both the head motion and background. It is robust to large head pose, occlusion, facial appearance variations, and different kinds of camera motions. We show our method advances the state of art in selfie video stabilization by comparing against alternative methods. The whole process runs very efficiently on a modern mobile phone (8.1 ms/frame).