DeblurSDI: Blind Image Deblurring Using Self-diffusion

Abstract: Blind image deconvolution is a challenging ill-posed inverse problem, where both the latent sharp image and the blur kernel are unknown. Traditional methods often rely on handcrafted priors, while modern deep learning approaches typically require extensive pre-training on large external datasets, limiting their adaptability to real-world scenarios. In this work, we propose DeblurSDI, a zero-shot, self-supervised framework based on self-diffusion (SDI) that requires no prior training. DeblurSDI formulates blind deconvolution as an iterative reverse self-diffusion process that starts from pure noise and progressively refines the solution. At each step, two randomly-initialized neural networks are optimized continuously to refine the sharp image and the blur kernel. The optimization is guided by an objective function combining data consistency with a sparsity-promoting L1-norm for the kernel. A key innovation is our noise scheduling mechanism, which stabilizes the optimization and provides remarkable robustness to variations in blur kernel size. These allow DeblurSDI to dynamically learn an instance-specific prior tailored to the input image. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DeblurSDI consistently achieves superior performance, recovering sharp images and accurate kernels even in highly degraded scenarios.