Self-Supervised Video Defocus Deblurring with Atlas Learning

Misfocus is ubiquitous for almost all video producers, degrading video quality and often causing expensive delays and reshoots. Current autofocus (AF) systems are vulnerable to sudden disturbances such as subject movement or lighting changes commonly present in real-world and on-set conditions. Single image defocus deblurring methods are temporally unstable when applied to videos and cannot recover details obscured by temporally varying defocus blur. In this paper, we present an end-to-end solution that allows users to correct misfocus during post-processing. Our method generates and parameterizes defocused videos into sharp layered neural atlases and propagates consistent focus tracking back to the video frames. We introduce a novel differentiable disk blur layer for more accurate point spread function (PSF) simulation, coupled with a circle of confusion (COC) map estimation module with knowledge transferred from the current single image defocus deblurring (SIDD) networks. Our pipeline offers consistent, sharp video reconstruction and effective subject-focus correction and tracking directly on the generated atlases. Furthermore, by adopting our approach, we achieve comparable results to the state-of-the-art optical flow estimation approach from defocus videos.