# A Sharpness Based Loss Function for Removing Out-of-Focus Blur

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.06014 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06014/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02921/) (2017)
- [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)
- [The Little Engine that Could: Regularization by Denoising (RED)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.02862/) (2016)
- [Low Dose CT Image Denoising Using a Generative Adversarial Network with Wasserstein Distance and Perceptual Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00961/) (2017)
- [Defocus Deblurring Using Dual-Pixel Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00305/) (2020)
- [Iterative Filter Adaptive Network for Single Image Defocus Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13610/) (2021)
- [Learning to Deblur using Light Field Generated and Real Defocus Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00367/) (2022)
- [ProxIQA: A Proxy Approach to Perceptual Optimization of Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.08845/) (2019)
- [Deep Richardson-Lucy Deconvolution for Low-Light Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05543/) (2023)
- [The Secrets of Non-Blind Poisson Deconvolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03105/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [A Subjective Study on a New Sharpness Informed Class of Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.13989/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The success of modern Deep Neural Network (DNN) approaches can be attributed to the use of complex optimization criteria beyond standard losses such as mean absolute error (MAE) or mean squared error (MSE). In this work, we propose a novel method of utilising a no-reference sharpness metric Q introduced by Zhu and Milanfar for removing out-of-focus blur from images. We also introduce a novel dataset of real-world out-of-focus images for assessing restoration models. Our fine-tuned method produces images with a 7.5 % increase in perceptual quality (LPIPS) as compared to a standard model trained only on MAE. Furthermore, we observe a 6.7 % increase in Q (reflecting sharper restorations) and 7.25 % increase in PSNR over most state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.