Multi‐scale GAN with residual image learning for removing heterogeneous blur

Abstract

Abstract Processing images with heterogeneous blur remains challenging due to multiple degradation aspects that could affect structural properties. This study proposes a deep learning‐based multi‐scaled generative adversarial network (GAN) with residual image learning to process variant and in‐variant blur. Different scaled images with corresponding gradients are concatenated as a multi‐channel single input for the proposed GAN. Residual‐ and dense‐networks are combined to explore salient features in the bottleneck section while addressing the vanishing gradient problem. A hybrid content loss function with a gradient penalty minimises the error between generated and ground truth images. Due to structure sparsity, the generated output may lose some information that leads to artifacts. Residual image learning with dilation and end‐to‐end training is used to resolve this issue by recovering high‐resolution anatomical details. Three different datasets: GoPro, Köhler, and Lai, with variant and in‐variant blur, are used to perform qualitative and quantitative analyses. Experiments show the proposed method is effective in reducing blur while preserving structural properties compared to multiple preprocessing techniques for image analysis. Moreover, the consistently improved performance over multiple publicly available datasets validates the merits of the proposed method for large data analysis.