# Realistic Compound-Lens Defocus Blur Synthesis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05837 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05837/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [Towards Robust Monocular Depth Estimation: Mixing Datasets for Zero-shot Cross-dataset Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01341/) (2019)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [Exploring CLIP for Assessing the Look and Feel of Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12396/) (2022)
- [Image Quality Assessment: Unifying Structure and Texture Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07728/) (2020)
- [Simple Baselines for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04676/) (2022)
- [MANIQA: Multi-dimension Attention Network for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08958/) (2022)
- [Depth Pro: Sharp Monocular Metric Depth in Less Than a Second](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02073/) (2024)
- [TOPIQ: A Top-down Approach from Semantics to Distortions for Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03060/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Single Image Defocus Deblurring Using Kernel-Sharing Parallel Atrous Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09108/) (2021)
- [Realistic Blur Synthesis for Learning Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08771/) (2022)
- [Learning to Deblur using Light Field Generated and Real Defocus Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00367/) (2022)
- [Curriculum Learning for ab initio Deep Learned Refractive Optics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01089/) (2023)
- [Optical Aberration Correction in Postprocessing using Imaging Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05867/) (2023)
- [Classification robustness to common optical aberrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15499/) (2023)
- [Learning Single Image Defocus Deblurring with Misaligned Training Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14502/) (2022)
- [Depth Estimation and Image Restoration by Deep Learning from Defocused Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10730/) (2023)
- [A Differentiable Wave Optics Model for End-to-End Computational Imaging System Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09774/) (2024)
- [TiDy-PSFs: Computational Imaging with Time-Averaged Dynamic Point-Spread-Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17583/) (2023)
- [A Physics-Informed Blur Learning Framework for Imaging Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11382/) (2025)
- [Efficient Depth- and Spatially-Varying Image Simulation for Defocus Deblur](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00372/) (2025)
- [Examining the Impact of Optical Aberrations to Image Classification and Object Detection Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18510/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Defocus blur degrades fine image structures and limits visual perception, which can adversely affect downstream vision tasks. Although recent deep learning deblurring methods have achieved strong performance, their effectiveness depends on training data and often degrades across cameras and lenses due to limited optical diversity and realism in existing datasets. In this paper, we propose a pipeline for synthesizing realistic defocus deblurring datasets for diverse compound lenses. It integrates efficient wave-optics PSF computation via Debye CZT propagation, depth-aware defocus rendering with occlusion handling, and blur synthesis in the radiometrically linear space with camera ISP simulation. This unified pipeline enables the scalable generation of photorealistic defocus datasets with diverse lens characteristics. Using our pipeline, we generate CLDefocus, a large-scale synthetic dataset containing lens-diverse defocus image pairs. We further analyze the limitations of real-captured defocus datasets and show that such imperfections can bias full-reference evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that models trained on CLDefocus achieve improved cross-device generalization compared to models trained on existing real and synthetic datasets.