MSSNet: Multi-Scale-Stage Network for Single Image Deblurring

Most of traditional single image deblurring methods before deep learning adopt a coarse-to-fine scheme that estimates a sharp image at a coarse scale and progressively refines it at finer scales. While this scheme has also been adopted to several deep learning-based approaches, recently a number of single-scale approaches have been introduced showing superior performance to previous coarse-to-fine approaches both in quality and computation time, making the traditional coarse-to-fine scheme seemingly obsolete. In this paper, we revisit the coarse-to-fine scheme, and analyze defects of previous coarse-to-fine approaches that degrade their performance. Based on the analysis, we propose Multi-Scale-Stage Network (MSSNet), a novel deep learning-based approach to single image deblurring that adopts our remedies to the defects. Specifically, MSSNet adopts three novel technical components: stage configuration reflecting blur scales, an inter-scale information propagation scheme, and a pixel-shuffle-based multi-scale scheme. Our experiments show that MSSNet achieves the state-of-the-art performance in terms of quality, network size, and computation time.