Region-Adaptive Dense Network for Efficient Motion Deblurring

In this paper, we address the problem of dynamic scene deblurring in the presence of motion blur. Restoration of images affected by severe blur necessitates a network design with a large receptive field, which existing networks attempt to achieve through simple increment in the number of generic convolution layers, kernel-size, or the scales at which the image is processed. However, these techniques ignore the non-uniform nature of blur, and they come at the expense of an increase in model size and inference time. We present a new architecture composed of region adaptive dense deformable modules that implicitly discover the spatially varying shifts responsible for non-uniform blur in the input image and learn to modulate the filters. This capability is complemented by a self-attentive module which captures non-local spatial relationships among the intermediate features and enhances the spatially varying processing capability. We incorporate these modules into a densely connected encoder-decoder design which utilizes pre-trained Densenet filters to further improve the performance. Our network facilitates interpretable modeling of the spatially-varying deblurring process while dispensing with multi-scale processing and large filters entirely. Extensive comparisons with prior art on benchmark dynamic scene deblurring datasets clearly demonstrate the superiority of the proposed networks via significant improvements in accuracy and speed, enabling almost real-time deblurring.