# Unfolded Deep Kernel Estimation for Blind Image Super-resolution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.05568 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05568/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02921/) (2017)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Very Deep Residual Channel Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02758/) (2018)
- [Real-ESRGAN: Training Real-World Blind Super-Resolution with Pure Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10833/) (2021)
- [Designing a Practical Degradation Model for Deep Blind Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14006/) (2021)
- ["Zero-Shot" Super-Resolution using Deep Internal Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06087/) (2017)
- [Deep Unfolding Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10428/) (2020)
- [Learning a Single Convolutional Super-Resolution Network for Multiple Degradations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06116/) (2017)
- [Blind Super-Resolution With Iterative Kernel Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03377/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Degradation Representation Learning for Blind Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00416/) (2021)
- [Blind Super-Resolution Kernel Estimation using an Internal-GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06581/) (2019)
- [Deep Learning for Single Image Super-Resolution: A Brief Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.03344/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Image Super-Resolution using Cycle-in-Cycle Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00437/) (2018)
- [Unfolding the Alternating Optimization for Blind Super Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02631/) (2020)
- [To learn image super-resolution, use a GAN to learn how to do image degradation first](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11458/) (2018)
- [Flow-based Kernel Prior with Application to Blind Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15977/) (2021)
- [Simple, Accurate, and Robust Nonparametric Blind Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03187/) (2015)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Human Guided Ground-truth Generation for Realistic Image Super-resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13069/) (2023)
- [Progressive Divide-and-Conquer via Subsampling Decomposition for Accelerated MRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10064/) (2024)
- [Blind Super-Resolution via Meta-learning and Markov Chain Monte Carlo Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08896/) (2024)
- [Single-Image Shadow Removal Using Deep Learning: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08865/) (2024)
- [Navigating Beyond Dropout: An Intriguing Solution Towards Generalizable Image Super Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18929/) (2024)
- [Image Translation with Kernel Prediction Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.08554/) (2025)
- [Not All Degradations Are Equal: A Targeted Feature Denoising Framework for Generalizable Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14841/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Blind image super-resolution (BISR) aims to reconstruct a high-resolution image from its low-resolution counterpart degraded by unknown blur kernel and noise. Many deep neural network based methods have been proposed to tackle this challenging problem without considering the image degradation model. However, they largely rely on the training sets and often fail to handle images with unseen blur kernels during inference. Deep unfolding methods have also been proposed to perform BISR by utilizing the degradation model. Nonetheless, the existing deep unfolding methods cannot explicitly solve the data term of the unfolding objective function, limiting their capability in blur kernel estimation. In this work, we propose a novel unfolded deep kernel estimation (UDKE) method, which, for the first time to our best knowledge, explicitly solves the data term with high efficiency. The UDKE based BISR method can jointly learn image and kernel priors in an end-to-end manner, and it can effectively exploit the information in both training data and image degradation model. Experiments on benchmark datasets and real-world data demonstrate that the proposed UDKE method could well predict complex unseen non-Gaussian blur kernels in inference, achieving significantly better BISR performance than state-of-the-art. The source code of UDKE is available at: https://github.com/natezhenghy/UDKE.