Removing multiple degradations, such as haze, rain, and blur, from real-world images poses a challenging and illposed problem. Recently, unified models that can handle different degradations have been proposed and yield promising results. However, these approaches focus on synthetic images and experience a significant performance drop when applied to realworld images. In this paper, we introduce Uni-Removal, a twostage semi-supervised framework for addressing the removal of multiple degradations in real-world images using a unified model and parameters. In the knowledge transfer stage, Uni-Removal leverages a supervised multi-teacher and student architecture in the knowledge transfer stage to facilitate learning from pretrained teacher networks specialized in different degradation types. A multi-grained contrastive loss is introduced to enhance learning from feature and image spaces. In the domain adaptation stage, unsupervised fine-tuning is performed by incorporating an adversarial discriminator on real-world images. The integration of an extended multi-grained contrastive loss and generative adversarial loss enables the adaptation of the student network from synthetic to real-world domains. Extensive experiments on real-world degraded datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. We compare our Uni-Removal framework with state-of-the-art supervised and unsupervised methods, showcasing its promising results in real-world image dehazing, deraining, and deblurring simultaneously.
University of South Carolina（南卡罗来纳大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Cleveland State University（克利夫兰州立大学）；Tianjin University（天津大学）
Facial landmark detection is a very fundamental and significant vision task with many important applications. In practice, facial landmark detection can be affected by a lot of natural degradations. One of the most common and important degradations is the shadow caused by light source blocking. While many advanced shadow removal methods have been proposed to recover the image quality in recent years, their effects to facial landmark detection are not well studied. For example, it remains unclear whether shadow removal could enhance the robustness of facial landmark detection to diverse shadow …
Unified Removal of Raindrops and Reflections: A New Benchmark and A Novel Pipeline
School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Zhejiang University（浙江大学航空航天学院）；Huanjiang Laboratory（浣江实验室）；Hangzhou Institute of Technology, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学杭州研究院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Huzhou University（湖州学院）；Huzhou Institute of Zhejiang University（浙江大学湖州研究院）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
As a special case of common object removal, image person removal is playing an increasingly important role in social media and criminal investigation domains. Due to the integrity of person area and the complexity of human posture, person removal has its own dilemmas. In this paper, we propose a novel idea to tackle these problems from the perspective of data synthesis. Concerning the lack of dedicated dataset for image person removal, two dataset production methods are proposed to automatically generate images, masks and ground truths respectively. Then, a learning framework similar to local …
Removing adverse weather conditions like rain, fog, and snow from images is an important problem in many applications. Most methods proposed in the literature have been designed to deal with just removing one type of degradation. Recently, a CNN-based method using neural architecture search (All-in-One) was proposed to remove all the weather conditions at once. However, it has a large number of parameters as it uses multiple encoders to cater to each weather removal task and still has scope for improvement in its performance. In this work, we focus on developing an efficient solution for the a…
Artificial lights commonly leave strong lens flare artifacts on images captured at night. Nighttime flare not only affects the visual quality but also degrades the performance of vision algorithms. Existing flare removal methods mainly focus on removing daytime flares and fail in nighttime. Nighttime flare removal is challenging because of the unique luminance and spectrum of artificial lights and the diverse patterns and image degradation of the flares captured at night. The scarcity of nighttime flare removal datasets limits the research on this crucial task. In this paper, we introduce, Fla…
Hierarchical Semantic-Visual Fusion of Visible and Near-infrared Images for Long-range Haze Removal
National Key Laboratory of Multispectral Information Intelligent Processing Technology, School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（多光谱信息智能处理技术国家实验室，人工智能与自动化学院，华中科技大学）；State Key Laboratory of Dynamic Optical Imaging and Measurement（动态光学成像与测量国家重点实验室）
Recent deep learning methods have achieved promising results in image shadow removal. However, their restored images still suffer from unsatisfactory boundary artifacts, due to the lack of degradation prior embedding and the deficiency in modeling capacity. Our work addresses these issues by proposing a unified diffusion framework that integrates both the image and degradation priors for highly effective shadow removal. In detail, we first propose a shadow degradation model, which inspires us to build a novel unrolling diffusion model, dubbed ShandowDiffusion. It remarkably improves the model'…
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）
Recent learning-based approaches show promising performance improvement for scene text removal task. However, these methods usually leave some remnants of text and obtain visually unpleasant results. In this work, we propose a novel "end-to-end" framework based on accurate text stroke detection. Specifically, we decouple the text removal problem into text stroke detection and stroke removal. We design a text stroke detection network and a text removal generation network to solve these two sub-problems separately. Then, we combine these two networks as a processing unit, and cascade this unit t…
Haze removal in aerial images is a challenging problem due to considerable variation in spatial details and varying contrast. Changes in particulate matter density often lead to degradation in visibility. Therefore, several approaches utilize multi-spectral data as auxiliary information for haze removal. In this paper, we propose SkyGAN for haze removal in aerial images. SkyGAN consists of 1) a domain-aware hazy-to-hyperspectral (H2H) module, and 2) a conditional GAN (cGAN) based multi-cue image-to-image translation module (I2I) for dehazing. The proposed H2H module reconstructs several visual…
Degradation-Aware Prompt Learning with Cross-Modal Compensation for Adverse Weather Removal
School of Software Engineering, Dalian University（大连大学软件工程学院）；School of Mathematical Sciences, Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学数学科学学院）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；University of California, San Francisco（加利福尼亚大学旧金山分校）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）
Combined Flicker-banding and Moire Removal for Screen-Captured Images
Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China（上海交通大学）；Central Media Technology Institute, Huawei, China（华为中央媒体技术研究所）；Department of XXX, University of YYY, Location, Country（YYY大学XXX系）；School of ZZZ, Institute of WWW, Location, Country（ZZZ学院WWW研究所）
Seoul National University（首尔大学）；Ewha Womans University（梨花女子大学）；Kangwon National University（江原大学）；Ziovision
Recently, the field of steganography has experienced rapid developments based on deep learning (DL). DL based steganography distributes secret information over all the available bits of the cover image, thereby posing difficulties in using conventional steganalysis methods to detect, extract or remove hidden secret images. However, our proposed framework is the first to effectively disable covert communications and transactions that use DL based steganography. We propose a DL based steganalysis technique that effectively removes secret images by restoring the distribution of the original image…
In winter scenes, the degradation of images taken under snow can be pretty complex, where the spatial distribution of snowy degradation is varied from image to image. Recent methods adopt deep neural networks to directly recover clean scenes from snowy images. However, due to the paradox caused by the variation of complex snowy degradation, achieving reliable High-Definition image desnowing performance in real time is a considerable challenge. We develop a novel Efficient Pyramid Network with asymmetrical encoder-decoder architecture for real-time HD image desnowing. The general idea of our pr…
Jimei University（集美大学）；Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Oceanic Information Perception and Intelligent Processing（福建省海洋信息感知与智能处理重点实验室）
Snow removal causes challenges due to its characteristic of complex degradations. To this end, targeted treatment of multi-scale snow degradations is critical for the network to learn effective snow removal. In order to handle the diverse scenes, we propose a multi-scale projection transformer (MSP-Former), which understands and covers a variety of snow degradation features in a multi-path manner, and integrates comprehensive scene context information for clean reconstruction via self-attention operation. For the local details of various snow degradations, the local capture module is introduce…
Tianjin University（天津大学）；Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)（香港中文大学（深圳））；University of California, Merced（加州大学默塞德分校）
Most existing non-blind restoration methods are based on the assumption that a precise degradation model is known. As the degradation process can only be partially known or inaccurately modeled, images may not be well restored. Rain streak removal and image deconvolution with inaccurate blur kernels are two representative examples of such tasks. For rain streak removal, although an input image can be decomposed into a scene layer and a rain streak layer, there exists no explicit formulation for modeling rain streaks and the composition with scene layer. For blind deconvolution, as estimation e…
Prompt to Restore, Restore to Prompt: Cyclic Prompting for Universal Adverse Weather Removal
School of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学计算机科学与信息工程学院）；School of Information and Communication Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学信息与通信工程学院）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学计算机科学与技术学院）
Task-Guided Prompting for Unified Remote Sensing Image Restoration
School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Ningbo University of Technology（宁波工程学院电子与信息工程学院）；University of Exeter（埃克塞特大学）；Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Finance, Ministry of Education（教育部智能金融工程研究中心）；School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics（西南财经大学计算机与人工智能学院）
Perceptive self-supervised learning network for noisy image watermark removal
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；National Engineering Laboratory for Integrated Aero-Space-Ground-Ocean Big Data Application Technology（空天地一体化大数据应用技术国家工程实验室）；School of Software（软件学院）；School of Electronics and Information（电子信息学院）；School of Computer Science（计算机学院）；Guangxi Key Lab of Multisource Information Mining & Security（广西多源信息挖掘与安全重点实验室）；College of Computer Science & Engineering（计算机科学与工程学院）
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
Rain streak removal is an important issue and has recently been investigated extensively. Existing methods, especially the newly emerged deep learning methods, could remove the rain streaks well in many cases. However the essential factor in the generative procedure of the rain streaks, i.e., the motion blur, which leads to the line pattern appearances, were neglected by the deep learning rain streaks approaches and this resulted in over-derain or under-derain results. In this paper, we propose a novel rain streak removal approach using a kernel guided convolutional neural network (KGCNN), ach…
NightHazeFormer: Single Nighttime Haze Removal Using Prior Query Transformer
Southwest University（西南大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Jimei University（集美大学）
With the recent increase in intelligent CCTVs for visual surveillance, a new image degradation that integrates resolution conversion and synthetic rain models is required. For example, in heavy rain, face images captured by CCTV from a distance have significant deterioration in both visibility and resolution. Unlike traditional image degradation models (IDM), such as rain removal and superresolution, this study addresses a new IDM referred to as a scale-aware heavy rain model and proposes a method for restoring high-resolution face images (HR-FIs) from low-resolution heavy rain face images (LR…
Degradation of image quality due to the presence of haze is a very common phenomenon. Existing DehazeNet [3], MSCNN [11] tackled the drawbacks of hand crafted haze relevant features. However, these methods have the problem of color distortion in gloomy (poor illumination) environment. In this paper, a cardinal (red, green and blue) color fusion network for single image haze removal is proposed. In first stage, network fusses color information present in hazy images and generates multi-channel depth maps. The second stage estimates the scene transmission map from generated dark channels using m…
Wuhan University（武汉大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；German Aerospace Center（德国航空航天中心）
The challenge of the cloud removal task can be alleviated with the aid of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images that can penetrate cloud cover. However, the large domain gap between optical and SAR images as well as the severe speckle noise of SAR images may cause significant interference in SAR-based cloud removal, resulting in performance degeneration. In this paper, we propose a novel global-local fusion based cloud removal (GLF-CR) algorithm to leverage the complementary information embedded in SAR images. Exploiting the power of SAR information to promote cloud removal entails two aspects…
Wavelet-Enhanced Desnowing: A Novel Single Image Restoration Approach for Traffic Surveillance under Adverse Weather Conditions
Automatic Control Research Institute, China Nuclear Power Engineering Co., Ltd.（中国核电工程有限公司自动控制研究院）；CNNC Engineering Research Center for Fuel Reprocessing（中核集团燃料后处理工程研究中心）；Chinese Aeronautical Establishment, Aviation Industry Corporation of China, Ltd（中国航空工业集团有限公司中国航空研究院）
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Images obtained in real-world low-light conditions are not only low in brightness, but they also suffer from many other types of degradation, such as color bias, unknown noise, detail loss and halo artifacts. In this paper, we propose a very fast deep learning framework called Bringing the Lightness (denoted as BLNet) that consists of two U-Nets with a series of well-designed loss functions to tackle all of the above degradations. Based on Retinex Theory, the decomposition net in our model can decompose low-light images into reflectance and illumination and remove noise in the reflectance duri…
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Tencent（腾讯）
Images captured in snowy days suffer from noticeable degradation of scene visibility, which degenerates the performance of current vision-based intelligent systems. Removing snow from images thus is an important topic in computer vision. In this paper, we propose a Deep Dense Multi-Scale Network (\textbf{DDMSNet}) for snow removal by exploiting semantic and geometric priors. As images captured in outdoor often share similar scenes and their visibility varies with depth from camera, such semantic and geometric information provides a strong prior for snowy image restoration. We incorporate the s…
