# Examining the Impact of Optical Aberrations to Image Classification and Object Detection Models

Source: [Examining the Impact of Optical Aberrations to Image Classification and Object Detection Models](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa78441e209131cea77823>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-28T13:57:15.835Z

Authors: Patrick M\\"uller, Alexander Braun, Margret Keuper

Published: 2025-04-25T17:23:47.000Z

## Abstract

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have proven to be successful in various computer vision applications such that models even infer in safety-critical situations. Therefore, vision models have to behave in a robust way to disturbances such as noise or blur. While seminal benchmarks exist to evaluate model robustness to diverse corruptions, blur is often approximated in an overly simplistic way to model defocus, while ignoring the different blur kernel shapes that result from optical systems. To study model robustness against realistic optical blur effects, this paper proposes two datasets of blur corruptions, which we denote OpticsBench and LensCorruptions. OpticsBench examines primary aberrations such as coma, defocus, and astigmatism, i.e. aberrations that can be represented by varying a single parameter of Zernike polynomials. To go beyond the principled but synthetic setting of primary aberrations, LensCorruptions samples linear combinations in the vector space spanned by Zernike polynomials, corresponding to 100 real lenses. Evaluations for image classification and object detection on ImageNet and MSCOCO show that for a variety of different pre-trained models, the performance on OpticsBench and LensCorruptions varies significantly, indicating the need to consider realistic image corruptions to evaluate a model's robustness against blur.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.18510>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.18510.pdf>)
