Self-Supervised Blind Image Deconvolution via Deep Generative Ensemble Learning

—Blind image deconvolution (BID) is about recovering a latent image with sharp details from its blurred observation generated by the convolution with an unknown smoothing kernel. Recently, deep generative priors from untrained neural networks (NNs) have emerged as a promising deep learning approach for BID, with the beneﬁt of being free of external training samples. However, existing untrained-NN-based BID methods may suffer from under-deblurring or overﬁtting. In this paper, we propose an ensemble approach to better exploit the priors from untrained NNs for BID, which aggregates the deblurring results of multiple untrained NNs for improvement. To enjoy both the effectiveness and computational efﬁciency in ensemble learning, the untrained NNs are designed with a speciﬁc shared-base and multi-head architecture. In addition, a kernel-centering layer is proposed for handling the shift ambiguity among different predictions during ensemble, which also improves the robustness of kernel prediction to the setting of the kernel size parameter. Extensive experiments show that the proposed approach noticeably outperforms both exiting dataset-free methods and dataset-based methods.