# Subtle Motion Blur Detection and Segmentation from Static Image Artworks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.18720 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18720/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (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)
- [Deep Stacked Hierarchical Multi-patch Network for Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03468/) (2019)
- [Dice Loss for Data-imbalanced NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02855/) (2019)
- [A Novel Focal Tversky loss function with improved Attention U-Net for lesion segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.07842/) (2018)
- [Learning a Convolutional Neural Network for Non-uniform Motion Blur Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.00593/) (2015)
- [Need for Speed: A Benchmark for Higher Frame Rate Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05884/) (2017)
- [From Motion Blur to Motion Flow: a Deep Learning Solution for Removing Heterogeneous Motion Blur](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02583/) (2016)
- [MPRNet: Multi-Path Residual Network for Lightweight Image Super Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04566/) (2020)
- [Learning to Synthesize Motion Blur](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11745/) (2018)
- [Spatially-Varying Blur Detection Based on Multiscale Fused and Sorted Transform Coefficients of Gradient Magnitudes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07478/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Streaming services serve hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide, where visual assets such as thumbnails, box art, and cover images are critical for engagement. Subtle motion blur remains a pervasive quality issue, reducing visual clarity and negatively affecting user trust and click-through rates. However, motion blur detection from static images is underexplored, as existing methods and datasets focus on severe blur and lack fine-grained pixel-level annotations needed for quality-critical applications. Benchmarks such as GOPRO and NFS are dominated by strong synthetic blur and often contain residual blur in their sharp references, leading to ambiguous supervision. We propose SMBlurDetect, a unified framework combining high-quality motion blur specific dataset generation with an end-to-end detector capable of zero-shot detection at multiple granularities. Our pipeline synthesizes realistic motion blur from super high resolution aesthetic images using controllable camera and object motion simulations over SAM segmented regions, enhanced with alpha-aware compositing and balanced sampling to generate subtle, spatially localized blur with precise ground truth masks. We train a U-Net based detector with ImageNet pretrained encoders using a hybrid mask and image centric strategy incorporating curriculum learning, hard negatives, focal loss, blur frequency channels, and resolution aware augmentation.Our method achieves strong zero-shot generalization, reaching 89.68% accuracy on GoPro (vs 66.50% baseline) and 59.77% Mean IoU on CUHK (vs 9.00% baseline), demonstrating 6.6x improvement in segmentation. Qualitative results show accurate localization of subtle blur artifacts, enabling automated filtering of low quality frames and precise region of interest extraction for intelligent cropping.