Deep Idempotent Network for Efficient Single Image Blind Deblurring

Single image blind deblurring is highly ill-posed as neither the latent sharp image nor the blur kernel is known. Even though considerable progress has been made, several major difficulties remain for blind deblurring, including the trade-off between high-performance deblurring and real-time processing. Besides, we observe that current single image blind deblurring networks cannot further improve or stabilize the performance but significantly degrades the performance when re-deblurring is repeatedly applied. This implies the limitation of these networks in modeling an ideal deblurring process. In this work, we make two contributions to tackle the above difficulties: (1) We introduce the idempotent constraint into the deblurring framework and present a deep idempotent network to achieve improved blind non-uniform deblurring performance with stable re-deblurring. (2) We propose a simple yet efficient deblurring network with lightweight encoder-decoder units and a recurrent structure that can deblur images in a progressive residual fashion. Extensive experiments on synthetic and realistic datasets prove the superiority of our proposed framework. Remarkably, our proposed network is nearly <tex-math notation="LaTeX">6.5× </tex-math> smaller and <tex-math notation="LaTeX">6.4× </tex-math> faster than the state-of-the-art while achieving comparable high performance.