Motion-aware noise filtering for deblurring of noisy and blurry images

Image noise can present a serious problem in motion deblurring. While most state-of-the-art motion deblurring algorithms can deal with small levels of noise, in many cases such as low-light imaging, the noise is large enough in the blurred image that it cannot be handled effectively by these algorithms. In this paper, we propose a technique for jointly denoising and deblurring such images that elevates the performance of existing motion deblurring algorithms. Our method takes advantage of estimated motion blur kernels to improve denoising, by constraining the denoised image to be consistent with the estimated camera motion (i.e., no high frequency noise features that do not match the motion blur). This improved denoising then leads to higher quality blur kernel estimation and deblurring performance. The two operations are iterated in this manner to obtain results superior to suppressing noise effects through regularization in deblurring or by applying denoising as a preprocess. This is demonstrated in experiments both quantitatively and qualitatively using various image examples.