An Algorithm Unrolling Approach to Deep Blind Image Deblurring

Blind image deblurring remains a topic of enduring interest. Learning based approaches, especially those that employ neural networks have emerged to complement traditional model based methods and in many cases achieve vastly enhanced performance. That said, neural network approaches are generally empirically designed and the underlying structures are difficult to interpret. In recent years, a promising technique called algorithm unrolling has been developed that has helped connect iterative algorithms such as those for sparse coding to neural network architectures. However, such connections have not been made yet for blind image deblurring. In this paper, we propose a neural network architecture based on this idea. We first present an iterative algorithm that may be considered as a generalization of the traditional total-variation regularization method in the gradient domain. We then unroll the algorithm to construct a neural network for image deblurring which we refer to as Deep Unrolling for Blind Deblurring (DUBLID). Key algorithm parameters are learned with the help of training images. Our proposed deep network DUBLID achieves significant practical performance gains while enjoying interpretability at the same time. Extensive experimental results show that DUBLID outperforms many state-of-the-art methods and in addition is computationally faster.