The RealDefocus Benchmark for Defocus Deblurring

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.

We introduce ErA (Error-Aware Deep Unrolling Network), an end-to-end frame work for single-image defocus deblurring. ErA jointly learns a compact kerne basis and per-pixel weights, while an error-aware term in Augmented Lagrangian unrolling corrects kernel estimation errors via alternating updates and ResUNet denoisers. It achieves state-of-the-art PSNR/SSIM on DPDD, RealDOF, and RTF, and shows strong generalization on CUHK without ground truth.

Motion blur remains one of the most common and visually disruptive degradations in real-world smartphone imaging, yet existing deblurring benchmarks are often limited in scale, resolution, or domain relevance. This gap is especially pronounced for smartphones, where rolling shutter, small sensors, and ISP processing produce blur statistics that differ from GoPro/DSLR-based benchmarks. We introduce a large-scale smartphone-oriented deblurring dataset constructed from 240~fps slow-motion video. To approximate exposure-time radiance integration, we synthesize blur by temporally averaging a fixed window of $N=30$ consecutive frames, which corresponds to an effective exposure of $T=1/8$~second, and we select the temporally centered frame as the sharp ground truth. The resulting benchmark contains 42,045 paired blur--sharp images at $1920\times1080$ resolution spanning 843 distinct scenes, with a train/test split of 37,841/4,204 pairs. We benchmark multiple state-of-the-art deblurring models using PSNR and SSIM and observe consistent performance degradation relative to the baseline similarity between the input blurry images and ground truth, underscoring the realism and difficulty of the proposed data. We release the dataset and generation scripts via HuggingFace to facilitate the development and evaluation of robust, deployment-oriented deblurring methods.