# FCL-GAN: A Lightweight and Real-Time Baseline for Unsupervised Blind Image Deblurring

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.07820 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07820/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [Multi-Stage Progressive Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02808/) (2021)
- [Deep Multi-scale Convolutional Neural Network for Dynamic Scene Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02177/) (2016)
- [DeblurGAN: Blind Motion Deblurring Using Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07064/) (2017)
- [DeblurGAN-v2: Deblurring (Orders-of-Magnitude) Faster and Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03826/) (2019)
- [Scale-recurrent Network for Deep Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01770/) (2018)
- [Rethinking Coarse-to-Fine Approach in Single Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05054/) (2021)
- [DualGAN: Unsupervised Dual Learning for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02510/) (2017)
- [Contrastive learning of global and local features for medical image segmentation with limited annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10511/) (2020)
- [Progressive Image Deraining Networks: A Better and Simpler Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09221/) (2019)
- [HINet: Half Instance Normalization Network for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06086/) (2021)
- [Contrastive Learning for Compact Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09367/) (2021)
- [Deep Stacked Hierarchical Multi-patch Network for Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03468/) (2019)
- [DetCo: Unsupervised Contrastive Learning for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04803/) (2021)
- [Deblurring by Realistic Blurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01860/) (2020)
- [Human-Aware Motion Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06816/) (2020)
- [Spatially-Attentive Patch-Hierarchical Network for Adaptive Motion Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05343/) (2020)
- [Multi-Temporal Recurrent Neural Networks For Progressive Non-Uniform Single Image Deblurring With Incremental Temporal Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07410/) (2019)
- [From Motion Blur to Motion Flow: a Deep Learning Solution for Removing Heterogeneous Motion Blur](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02583/) (2016)
- [Unpaired Deep Image Deraining Using Dual Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02973/) (2021)
- [Contrastive Learning for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.02534/) (2017)
- [BANet: Blur-aware Attention Networks for Dynamic Scene Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07518/) (2021)
- [Reblur2Deblur: Deblurring Videos via Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.05117/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Domain-Specific Deblurring via Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.01594/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Diffusion Models for Image Restoration and Enhancement: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09388/) (2023)
- [Mutual Information-driven Triple Interaction Network for Efficient Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06998/) (2023)
- [A Unified Framework for Microscopy Defocus Deblur with Multi-Pyramid Transformer and Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02611/) (2024)
- [Noise Self-Regression: A New Learning Paradigm to Enhance Low-Light Images Without Task-Related Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04700/) (2022)
- [Cut-and-Paste: Subject-Driven Video Editing with Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11697/) (2023)
- [Blur2Blur: Blur Conversion for Unsupervised Image Deblurring on Unknown Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16205/) (2024)
- [Deep learning in motion deblurring: current status, benchmarks and future prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05055/) (2024)
- [Boosting Visual Recognition in Real-world Degradations via Unsupervised Feature Enhancement Module with Deep Channel Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01703/) (2024)
- [Decoupled Cross-Scale Cross-View Interaction for Stereo Image Enhancement in The Dark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00859/) (2022)
- [Brighten-and-Colorize: A Decoupled Network for Customized Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03029/) (2023)
- [A Dataset and Model for Realistic License Plate Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13677/) (2024)
- [MIPI 2024 Challenge on Nighttime Flare Removal: Methods and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19534/) (2024)
- [Sim-to-Real: An Unsupervised Noise Layer for Screen-Camera Watermarking Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18906/) (2025)
- [Learning Deblurring Texture Prior from Unpaired Data with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13599/) (2025)
- [Unsupervised Methods for Video Quality Improvement: A Survey of Restoration and Enhancement Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.08375/) (2025)
- [OSIC: A New One-Stage Image Captioner Coined](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.02321/) (2022)
- [AMSA-UNet: An Asymmetric Multiple Scales U-net Based on Self-attention for Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09015/) (2024)
- [Generative Manifold Distillation: Aligning Restoration Trajectories with Natural Image Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11121/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Blind image deblurring (BID) remains a challenging and significant task. Benefiting from the strong fitting ability of deep learning, paired data-driven supervised BID method has obtained great progress. However, paired data are usually synthesized by hand, and the realistic blurs are more complex than synthetic ones, which makes the supervised methods inept at modeling realistic blurs and hinders their real-world applications. As such, unsupervised deep BID method without paired data offers certain advantages, but current methods still suffer from some drawbacks, e.g., bulky model size, long inference time, and strict image resolution and domain requirements. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and real-time unsupervised BID baseline, termed Frequency-domain Contrastive Loss Constrained Lightweight CycleGAN (shortly, FCL-GAN), with attractive properties, i.e., no image domain limitation, no image resolution limitation, 25x lighter than SOTA, and 5x faster than SOTA. To guarantee the lightweight property and performance superiority, two new collaboration units called lightweight domain conversion unit(LDCU) and parameter-free frequency-domain contrastive unit(PFCU) are designed. LDCU mainly implements inter-domain conversion in lightweight manner. PFCU further explores the similarity measure, external difference and internal connection between the blurred domain and sharp domain images in frequency domain, without involving extra parameters. Extensive experiments on several image datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our FCL-GAN in terms of performance, model size and reference time.