# Image as an IMU: Estimating Camera Motion from a Single Motion-Blurred Image

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.17358 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17358/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [DUSt3R: Geometric 3D Vision Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14132/) (2023)
- [Grounding Image Matching in 3D with MASt3R](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09756/) (2024)
- [ORB-SLAM3: An Accurate Open-Source Library for Visual, Visual-Inertial and Multi-Map SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11898/) (2020)
- [ScanNet++: A High-Fidelity Dataset of 3D Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11417/) (2023)
- [Deep Multi-scale Convolutional Neural Network for Dynamic Scene Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02177/) (2016)
- [DROID-SLAM: Deep Visual SLAM for Monocular, Stereo, and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10869/) (2021)
- [LightGlue: Local Feature Matching at Light Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13643/) (2023)
- [From Coarse to Fine: Robust Hierarchical Localization at Large Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03506/) (2018)
- [Continuous 3D Perception Model with Persistent State](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12387/) (2025)
- [Direct Sparse Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.02565/) (2016)
- [iMAP: Implicit Mapping and Positioning in Real-Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12352/) (2021)
- [MonST3R: A Simple Approach for Estimating Geometry in the Presence of Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03825/) (2024)
- [Fast3R: Towards 3D Reconstruction of 1000+ Images in One Forward Pass](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13928/) (2025)
- [DISK: Learning local features with policy gradient](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13566/) (2020)
- [3D Reconstruction with Spatial Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16061/) (2024)
- [SegNeXt: Rethinking Convolutional Attention Design for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08575/) (2022)
- [Real-Time Intermediate Flow Estimation for Video Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.06294/) (2020)
- [MASt3R-SLAM: Real-Time Dense SLAM with 3D Reconstruction Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12392/) (2024)
- [Kimera: an Open-Source Library for Real-Time Metric-Semantic Localization and Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02490/) (2019)
- [Splatt3R: Zero-shot Gaussian Splatting from Uncalibrated Image Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13912/) (2024)
- [Learning a Convolutional Neural Network for Non-uniform Motion Blur Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.00593/) (2015)
- [DeepFactors: Real-Time Probabilistic Dense Monocular SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.05049/) (2020)
- [TartanVO: A Generalizable Learning-based VO](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00359/) (2020)
- [On-Manifold Preintegration for Real-Time Visual-Inertial Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02363/) (2015)
- [Deep Image Deblurring: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10700/) (2022)
- [From Motion Blur to Motion Flow: a Deep Learning Solution for Removing Heterogeneous Motion Blur](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02583/) (2016)
- [Prompting Depth Anything for 4K Resolution Accurate Metric Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14015/) (2024)
- [Scene Coordinate Reconstruction: Posing of Image Collections via Incremental Learning of a Relocalizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14351/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [BEDLAM2.0: Synthetic Humans and Cameras in Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14394/) (2025)
- [MoBGS: Motion Deblurring Dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting for Blurry Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15122/) (2025)
- [ForestVO: Enhancing Visual Odometry in Forest Environments through ForestGlue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01261/) (2025)
- [Unblur-SLAM: Dense Neural SLAM for Blurry Inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26810/) (2026)
- [GeoBlur: Epipolar Geometry Estimation from a Single Motion-Blurred Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01552/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In many robotics and VR/AR applications, fast camera motions lead to a high level of motion blur, causing existing camera pose estimation methods to fail. In this work, we propose a novel framework that leverages motion blur as a rich cue for motion estimation rather than treating it as an unwanted artifact. Our approach works by predicting a dense motion flow field and a monocular depth map directly from a single motion-blurred image. We then recover the instantaneous camera velocity by solving a linear least squares problem under the small motion assumption. In essence, our method produces an IMU-like measurement that robustly captures fast and aggressive camera movements. To train our model, we construct a large-scale dataset with realistic synthetic motion blur derived from ScanNet++v2 and further refine our model by training end-to-end on real data using our fully differentiable pipeline. Extensive evaluations on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art angular and translational velocity estimates, outperforming current methods like MASt3R and COLMAP.