High-Speed Image Restoration Based on a Dynamic Vision Sensor

We report on the post-capture, on-demand deblurring technique based on a Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS). Motion blur causes photographic defects inherently in most use cases of mobile cameras. To compensate for motion blur in mobile photography, we use a fast event-based vision sensor. However, in this paper, we found severe artifacts resulting in image quality degradation caused by color ghosts, event noises, and discrepancies between conventional image sensors and event-based sensors. To overcome these inevitable artifacts, we propose and demonstrate event-based compensation techniques such as cross-correlation optimization, contrast maximization, resolution mismatch compensation (event upsampling for alignment), and disparity matching. The results show that the deblur performance can be improved dramatically in terms of metrics such as the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM), and Spatial Frequency Response (SFR). Thus, we expect that the proposed event-based image restoration technique can be widely deployed in mobile cameras.