SAM-DEBLUR: Let Segment Anything Boost Image Deblurring

Image deblurring is a critical task in the field of image restoration, aiming to eliminate blurring artifacts. However, the challenge of addressing non-uniform blurring leads to an ill-posed problem, which limits the generalization performance of existing deblurring models. To solve the problem, we propose a framework SAM-Deblur, integrating prior knowledge from the Segment Anything Model (SAM) into the deblurring task for the first time. In particular, SAM-Deblur is divided into three stages. First, we preprocess the blurred images, obtain segment masks via SAM, and propose a mask dropout method for training to enhance model robustness. Then, to fully leverage the structural priors generated by SAM, we propose a Mask Average Pooling (MAP) unit specifically designed to average SAM-generated segmented areas, serving as a plug-and-play component which can be seamlessly integrated into existing deblurring networks. Finally, we feed the fused features generated by the MAP Unit into the deblurring model to obtain a sharp image. Experimental results on the RealBlurJ, ReloBlur, and REDS datasets reveal that incorporating our methods improves GoPro-trained NAFNet’s PSNR by 0.05, 0.96, and 7.03, respectively. Project page is available at GitHub HPLQAQ/SAM-Deblur.