DeepDeblur : text image recovery from blur to sharp

Abstract

Digital images could be degraded by a variety of blur during the image acquisition (i.e. relative motion of cameras, electronic noise, capturing defocus, and so on). Blurring images can be computationally modeled as the result of a convolution process with the corresponding blur kernel and thus, image deblurring can be regarded as a deconvolution operation. In this paper, we explore to deblur images by approximating blind deconvolutions using a deep neural network. Different deep neural network structures are investigated to evaluate their deblurring capabilities, which contributes to the optimal design of a network architecture. It is found that shallow and narrow networks are not capable of handling complex motion blur. We thus, present a deep network with 20 layers to cope with text image blur. In addition, a novel network structure with Sequential Highway Connections (SHC) is leveraged to gain superior convergence. The experiment results demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of the proposed framework with the higher visual quality of the delurred images.