Blur2seq: Blind Deblurring and Camera Trajectory Estimation from a Single Camera Motion-blurred Image

TL;DR

Blur2seq introduces a deep learning approach that jointly estimates camera motion and restores sharp images from a single motion-blurred photo, achieving state-of-the-art results especially with severe or spatially variant blur.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel modular framework combining a neural network and model-based methods to estimate 3D camera trajectories and restore images from a single motion-blurred input.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art deblurring performance on synthetic and real datasets.

Effectively handles severe and spatially variant motion blur.

Provides interpretable camera motion trajectories for better understanding.

Abstract

Motion blur caused by camera shake, particularly under large or rotational movements, remains a major challenge in image restoration. We propose a deep learning framework that jointly estimates the latent sharp image and the underlying camera motion trajectory from a single blurry image. Our method leverages the Projective Motion Blur Model (PMBM), implemented efficiently using a differentiable blur creation module compatible with modern networks. A neural network predicts a full 3D rotation trajectory, which guides a model-based restoration network trained end-to-end. This modular architecture provides interpretability by revealing the camera motion that produced the blur. Moreover, this trajectory enables the reconstruction of the sequence of sharp images that generated the observed blurry image. To further refine results, we optimize the trajectory post-inference via a reblur loss, improving consistency between the blurry input and the restored output. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and real datasets, particularly in cases with severe or spatially variant blur, where end-to-end deblurring networks struggle. Code and trained models are available at https://github.com/GuillermoCarbajal/Blur2Seq/