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DeepDeblur: text image recovery from blur to sharp

Multimedia Tools and Applications volume 78, pages 18869–18885 (2019)Cite this article

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.

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Notes

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Jianhan Mei, Henghui Ding & Xudong Jiang

  2. The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China

    Ziming Wu

  3. Fachbereich Informatik, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Xiang Chen

  4. Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, China

    Yu Qiao

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  1. Jianhan Mei
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  2. Ziming Wu
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  3. Xiang Chen
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  4. Yu Qiao
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  5. Henghui Ding
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Correspondence to Xudong Jiang.

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Mei, J., Wu, Z., Chen, X. et al. DeepDeblur: text image recovery from blur to sharp. Multimed Tools Appl 78, 18869–18885 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-019-7251-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-019-7251-y

Keywords

  • Text Deblurring
  • Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)
  • Blind deconvolution
  • Short connection