# SSMB: Self-Supervised Local Feature Detection under Motion Blur

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.27181 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.27181/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [SuperPoint: Self-Supervised Interest Point Detection and Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07629/) (2017)
- [LoFTR: Detector-Free Local Feature Matching with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00680/) (2021)
- [NetVLAD: CNN architecture for weakly supervised place recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07247/) (2015)
- [ORB-SLAM3: An Accurate Open-Source Library for Visual, Visual-Inertial and Multi-Map SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11898/) (2020)
- [Deep Multi-scale Convolutional Neural Network for Dynamic Scene Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02177/) (2016)
- [LightGlue: Local Feature Matching at Light Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13643/) (2023)
- [DeblurGAN: Blind Motion Deblurring Using Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07064/) (2017)
- [Scale-recurrent Network for Deep Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01770/) (2018)
- [DISK: Learning local features with policy gradient](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13566/) (2020)
- [MAXIM: Multi-Axis MLP for Image Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02973/) (2022)
- [RoMa: Robust Dense Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15404/) (2023)
- [HPatches: A benchmark and evaluation of handcrafted and learned local descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05939/) (2017)
- [Working hard to know your neighbor's margins: Local descriptor learning loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.10872/) (2017)
- [R2D2: Repeatable and Reliable Detector and Descriptor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06195/) (2019)
- [Deblurring by Realistic Blurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01860/) (2020)
- [ASpanFormer: Detector-Free Image Matching with Adaptive Span Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.14201/) (2022)
- [LF-Net: Learning Local Features from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09662/) (2018)
- [Learning a Convolutional Neural Network for Non-uniform Motion Blur Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.00593/) (2015)
- [MatchFormer: Interleaving Attention in Transformers for Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09645/) (2022)
- [ALIKED: A Lighter Keypoint and Descriptor Extraction Network via Deformable Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03608/) (2023)
- [Key.Net: Keypoint Detection by Handcrafted and Learned CNN Filters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00889/) (2019)
- [XFeat: Accelerated Features for Lightweight Image Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19174/) (2024)
- [Repeatability Is Not Enough: Learning Affine Regions via Discriminability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06704/) (2017)
- [SiLK -- Simple Learned Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06194/) (2023)
- [RoMa v2: Harder Better Faster Denser Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15706/) (2025)
- [DeDoDe v2: Analyzing and Improving the DeDoDe Keypoint Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08928/) (2024)
- [BALF: Simple and Efficient Blur Aware Local Feature Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14731/) (2022)
- [Self-Supervised Equivariant Learning for Oriented Keypoint Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08613/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Keypoint detection under motion blur remains a significant challenge, as blur distorts local image structure and degrades the repeatability of feature localization. Existing approaches either rely on computationally expensive deblur-then-detect pipelines that may introduce restoration artifacts, or learn to regress the image positions of handcrafted keypoints extracted on sharp images, which reflects the assumptions of the handcrafted detector rather than what is truly repeatable under blur. We present SSMB, a deblur-free, self-supervised keypoint detector for motion-blurred images that requires neither handcrafted detectors nor external pseudo-labels. SSMB introduces the Local Discriminability Enhancement (LDE) module, which restores fine-grained local discriminability after global feature mixing. Training is performed in two stages. First, geometric pretraining on synthetic shapes bootstraps spatially discriminative keypoint detection without any external detector, just from the rendered geometry. Second, blur-aware training on real sharp-blur image pairs learns blur-invariant detection through a multi-component self-supervised objective that enforces cross-domain consistency, geometric alignment, and spatial coverage. Extensive evaluations on keypoint detection, image matching, relative pose estimation, and visual localization under motion blur demonstrate that SSMB establishes a new state-of-the-art among sparse keypoint detectors, consistently outperforming both supervised and self-supervised baselines across all tasks. Code, models, and datasets will be publicly available upon paper acceptance.
