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When a camera is pointed at a strong light source, the resulting photograph may contain lens flare artifacts. Flares appear in a wide variety of patterns (halos, streaks, color bleeding, haze, etc.) and this diversity in appearance makes flare removal challenging. Existing analytical solutions make strong assumptions about the artifact’s geometry or brightness, and therefore only work well on a small subset of flares. Machine learning techniques have shown success in removing other types of artifacts, like reflections, but have not been widely applied to flare removal due to the lack of training data. To solve this problem, we explicitly model the optical causes of flare either empirically or using wave optics, and generate semi-synthetic pairs of flare-corrupted and clean images. This enables us to train neural networks to remove lens flare for the first time. Experiments show our data synthesis approach is critical for accurate flare removal, and that models trained with our technique generalize well to real lens flares across different scenes, lighting conditions, and cameras. 

We present a method that takes as input a single dual-pixel image, and simultaneously estimates the image's defocus map---the amount of defocus blur at each pixel---and recovers an all-in-focus image. Our method is inspired from recent works that leverage the dual-pixel sensors available in many consumer cameras to assist with autofocus, and use them for recovery of defocus maps or all-in-focus images. These prior works have solved the two recovery problems independently of each other, and often require large labeled datasets for supervised training. By contrast, we show that it is beneficial to treat these two closely-connected problems simultaneously. To this end, we set up an optimization problem that, by carefully modeling the optics of dual-pixel images, jointly solves both problems. We use data captured with a consumer smartphone camera to demonstrate that, after a one-time calibration step, our approach improves upon prior works for both defocus map estimation and blur removal, despite being entirely unsupervised.