Towards Efficient Image Deblurring for Edge Deployment

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hardware-aware framework for optimizing image deblurring models, significantly reducing latency on edge devices while maintaining high accuracy, thus enabling real-time mobile image processing.

Contribution

The authors develop a sensitivity-guided adaptation framework that restructures existing models for improved efficiency on embedded hardware, demonstrated on a baseline network with substantial latency reduction.

Findings

Up to 55% reduction in GMACs compared to transformer-based SOTA

1.25X latency improvement on device deployment

Effective across multiple deblurring benchmarks

Abstract

Image deblurring is a critical stage in mobile image signal processing pipelines, where the ability to restore fine structures and textures must be balanced with real-time constraints on edge devices. While recent deep networks such as transformers and activation-free architectures achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracy, their efficiency is typically measured in FLOPs or parameters, which do not correlate with latency on embedded hardware. We propose a hardware-aware adaptation framework that restructures existing models through sensitivity-guided block substitution, surrogate distillation, and training-free multi-objective search driven by device profiling. Applied to the 36-block NAFNet baseline, the optimized variants achieve up to 55% reduction in GMACs compared to the recent transformer-based SOTA while maintaining competitive accuracy. Most importantly, on-device deployment yields a 1.25X latency improvement over the baseline. Experiments on motion deblurring (GoPro), defocus deblurring (DPDD), and auxiliary benchmarks (RealBlur-J/R, HIDE) demonstrate the generality of the approach, while comparisons with prior efficient baselines confirm its accuracy-efficiency trade-off. These results establish feedback-driven adaptation as a principled strategy for bridging the gap between algorithmic design and deployment-ready deblurring models.