DeFusionNET: Defocus Blur Detection via Recurrently Fusing and Refining Multi-Scale Deep Features

Defocus blur detection aims to detect out-of-focus regions from an image. Although attracting more and more attention due to its widespread applications, defocus blur detection still confronts several challenges such as the interference of background clutter, sensitivity to scales and missing boundary details of defocus blur regions. To deal with these issues, we propose a deep neural network which recurrently fuses and refines multi-scale deep features (DeFusionNet) for defocus blur detection. We firstly utilize a fully convolutional network to extract multi-scale deep features. The features from bottom layers are able to capture rich low-level features for details preservation, while the features from top layers can characterize the semantic information to locate blur regions. These features from different layers are fused as shallow features and semantic features, respectively. After that, the fused shallow features are propagated to top layers for refining the fine details of detected defocus blur regions, and the fused semantic features are propagated to bottom layers to assist in better locating the defocus regions. The feature fusing and refining are carried out in a recurrent manner. Also, we finally fuse the output of each layer at the last recurrent step to obtain the final defocus blur map by considering the sensitivity to scales of the defocus degree. Experiments on two commonly used defocus blur detection benchmark datasets are conducted to demonstrate the superority of DeFusionNet when compared with other 10 competitors. Code and more results can be found at: http://tangchang.net