Generalization has long been a central challenge in real-world image restoration. While recent diffusion-based restoration methods, which leverage generative priors from text-to-image models, have made progress in recovering more realistic details, they still encounter "generative capability deactivation" when applied to out-of-distribution real-world data. To address this, we propose using text as an auxiliary invariant representation to reactivate the generative capabilities of these models. We begin by identifying two key properties of text input: richness and relevance, and examine their respective influence on model performance. Building on these insights, we introduce Res-Captioner, a module that generates enhanced textual descriptions tailored to image content and degradation levels, effectively mitigating response failures. Additionally, we present RealIR, a new benchmark designed to capture diverse real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Res-Captioner significantly enhances the generalization abilities of diffusion-based restoration models, while remaining fully plug-and-play.
University at Albany, SUNY（纽约州立大学奥尔巴尼分校）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Several important classes of images such as text, barcode and pattern images have the property that pixels can only take a distinct subset of values. This knowledge can benefit the restoration of such images, but it has not been widely considered in current restoration methods. In this work, we describe an effective and efficient approach to incorporate the knowledge of distinct pixel values of the pristine images into the general regularized least squares restoration framework. We introduce a new regularizer that attains zero at the designated pixel values and becomes a quadratic penalty func…
Scan Clusters, Not Pixels: A Cluster-Centric Paradigm for Efficient Ultra-high-definition Image Restoration
National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；HKUST(GZ)（香港理工大学）；Qilu University of Technology（青岛科技大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑技术大学）；TeleAI, China Telecom（TeleAI，中国电信）；Beihang University（北航）
Nankai International Advanced Research Institute（南开大学国际高等研究院）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；College of Computer Science, Nankai University（南开大学计算机学院）；University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学）；University of Macau（澳门大学）
Southwest Jiaotong University（西南交通大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Tongji University（同济大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Central China Normal University（华中师范大学）；Yerevan Physics Institute（埃里温物理研究所）
We study active restoration of noise-corrupted images generated via the Gibbs probability of an Ising ferromagnet in external magnetic field. Ferromagnetism accounts for the prior expectation of data smoothness, i.e. a positive correlation between neighbouring pixels (Ising spins), while the magnetic field refers to the bias. The restoration is actively supervised by requesting the true values of certain pixels after a noisy observation. This additional information improves restoration of other pixels. The optimal strategy of active inference is not known for realistic (two-dimensional) images…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）
How to aggregate spatial information plays an essential role in learning-based image restoration. Most existing CNN-based networks adopt static convolutional kernels to encode spatial information, which cannot aggregate spatial information adaptively. Recent transformer-based architectures achieve adaptive spatial aggregation. But they lack desirable inductive biases of convolutions and require heavy computational costs. In this paper, we propose a kernel basis attention (KBA) module, which introduces learnable kernel bases to model representative image patterns for spatial information aggrega…
Rethinking RGB Color Representation for Image Restoration Models
Seoul National University（首尔大学）；Hanyang University（汉阳大学）；ASRI（ASRI（高级科学技术研究所））；Interdisciplinary Program in Artificial Intelligence, Seoul National University（首尔大学人工智能跨学科项目）
Inception Institute of AI（人工智能起源研究所）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of AI（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）；University of California, Merced（加州大学默塞德分校）；Yonsei University（延世大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Since convolutional neural networks (CNNs) perform well at learning generalizable image priors from large-scale data, these models have been extensively applied to image restoration and related tasks. Recently, another class of neural architectures, Transformers, have shown significant performance gains on natural language and high-level vision tasks. While the Transformer model mitigates the shortcomings of CNNs (i.e., limited receptive field and inadaptability to input content), its computational complexity grows quadratically with the spatial resolution, therefore making it infeasible to ap…
Rungta College of Engineering & Technology（龙塔工程技术学院）；National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST)（国家科学技术学院（NIST））；Aditya Institute of Technology（阿迪蒂亚理工学院）；National Academy of Aviation（国家航空学院）
Removing noise from the any processed images is very important. Noise should be removed in such a way that important information of image should be preserved. A decisionbased nonlinear algorithm for elimination of band lines, drop lines, mark, band lost and impulses in images is presented in this paper. The algorithm performs two simultaneous operations, namely, detection of corrupted pixels and evaluation of new pixels for replacing the corrupted pixels. Removal of these artifacts is achieved without damaging edges and details. However, the restricted window size renders median operation less…
School of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong University（山东大学信息科学与工程学院）；Hisense Group（海信集团）
This paper presents a super-resolution method based on gradient-based adaptive interpolation. In this method, in addition to considering the distance between the interpolated pixel and the neighboring valid pixel, the interpolation coefficients take the local gradient of the original image into account. The smaller the local gradient of a pixel is, the more influence it should have on the interpolated pixel. And the interpolated high resolution image is finally deblurred by the application of wiener filter. Experimental results show that our proposed method not only substantially improves the …
Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）；Indian Institute of Technology Madras（印度理工学院马德拉斯分校）
We present a general learning-based solution for restoring images suffering from spatially-varying degradations. Prior approaches are typically degradation-specific and employ the same processing across different images and different pixels within. However, we hypothesize that such spatially rigid processing is suboptimal for simultaneously restoring the degraded pixels as well as reconstructing the clean regions of the image. To overcome this limitation, we propose SPAIR, a network design that harnesses distortion-localization information and dynamically adjusts computation to difficult regio…
Image restoration is a technique that reconstructs a feasible estimate of the original image from the noisy observation. In this paper, we present a U-Net based deep neural network model to restore the missing pixels on the lunar surface image in a context-aware fashion, which is often known as image inpainting problem. We use the grayscale image of the lunar surface captured by Multiband Imager (MI) onboard Kaguya satellite for our experiments and the results show that our method can reconstruct the lunar surface image with good visual quality and improved PSNR values.
While machine learning approaches to image restoration offer great promise, current methods risk training models fixated on performing well only for image corruption of a particular level of difficulty---such as a certain level of noise or blur. First, we examine the weakness of conventional "fixated" models and demonstrate that training general models to handle arbitrary levels of corruption is indeed non-trivial. Then, we propose an on-demand learning algorithm for training image restoration models with deep convolutional neural networks. The main idea is to exploit a feedback mechanism to s…
Boosting Image Restoration via Priors from Pre-trained Models
Zhejiang Lab（之江实验室）；CUHK（香港中文大学）；RealityEdge（睿迪智芯）；University of Macau（澳门大学）；Institute of Collaborative Innovation（协同创新研究院）；Texas A&M University（德克萨斯农工大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
Rungta College of Engineering & Technology（龙格塔工程技术学院）；National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST)（国家科学技术学院（NIST））；National Academy of Aviation（国家航空学院）
This paper proposes a new technique based on a non-linear Minmax Detector Based (MDB) filter for image restoration. The aim of image enhancement is to reconstruct the true image from the corrupted image. The process of image acquisition frequently leads to degradation and the quality of the digitized image becomes inferior to the original image. Image degradation can be due to the addition of different types of noise in the original image. Image noise can be modelled of many types and impulse noise is one of them. Impulse noise generates pixels with gray value not consistent with their local n…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）
Video restoration tasks, including super-resolution, deblurring, etc, are drawing increasing attention in the computer vision community. A challenging benchmark named REDS is released in the NTIRE19 Challenge. This new benchmark challenges existing methods from two aspects: (1) how to align multiple frames given large motions, and (2) how to effectively fuse different frames with diverse motion and blur. In this work, we propose a novel Video Restoration framework with Enhanced Deformable networks, termed EDVR, to address these challenges. First, to handle large motions, we devise a Pyramid, C…
This paper presents a scalable approximate Bayesian method for image restoration using total variation (TV) priors. In contrast to most optimization methods based on maximum a posteriori estimation, we use the expectation propagation (EP) framework to approximate minimum mean squared error (MMSE) estimators and marginal (pixel-wise) variances, without resorting to Monte Carlo sampling. For the classical anisotropic TV-based prior, we also propose an iterative scheme to automatically adjust the regularization parameter via expectation-maximization (EM). Using Gaussian approximating densities wi…
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）
Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School（北京大学深圳研究生院）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
Non-local self-similarity in natural images has been verified to be an effective prior for image restoration. However, most existing deep non-local methods assign a fixed number of neighbors for each query item, neglecting the dynamics of non-local correlations. Moreover, the non-local correlations are usually based on pixels, prone to be biased due to image degradation. To rectify these weaknesses, in this paper, we propose a dynamic attentive graph learning model (DAGL) to explore the dynamic non-local property on patch level for image restoration. Specifically, we propose an improved graph …
Neural Discrimination-Prompted Transformers for Efficient UHD Image Restoration and Enhancement
Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学深圳校区）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；University of California, San Francisco（加州大学旧金山分校）
University of Notre Dame（圣母大学）；University of Ljubljana（卢布尔雅那大学）
Advances in image restoration and enhancement techniques have led to discussion about how such algorithmscan be applied as a pre-processing step to improve automatic visual recognition. In principle, techniques like deblurring and super-resolution should yield improvements by de-emphasizing noise and increasing signal in an input image. But the historically divergent goals of the computational photography and visual recognition communities have created a significant need for more work in this direction. To facilitate new research, we introduce a new benchmark dataset called UG^2, which contain…
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）；Lingnan University（岭南大学）；Hong Kong Metropolitan University（香港都会大学）
Adverse weather conditions such as haze, rain, and snow often impair the quality of captured images, causing detection networks trained on normal images to generalize poorly in these scenarios. In this paper, we raise an intriguing question - if the combination of image restoration and object detection, can boost the performance of cutting-edge detectors in adverse weather conditions. To answer it, we propose an effective yet unified detection paradigm that bridges these two subtasks together via dynamic enhancement learning to discern objects in adverse weather conditions, called TogetherNet.…
From Pixels to Pathology: Restoration Diffusion for Diagnostic-Consistent Virtual IHC
organization= Institute of Pathology, Technical University of Munich, TUM School of Medicine；organization= Computer Aided Medical Procedures (CAMP), TU Munich , city= Munich , country= Germany；organization= Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML) , city= Munich , country= Germany；organization= TUM School of Computation, Information；organization= Department of Medical Informatics, School of Medicine, Mashhad University of Medical Sciences , city= Mashhad , country= Iran；organization= Munich Data Science Institute (MDSI) , city= Munich , country= Germany
This paper investigates a fully unsupervised statistical method for edge preserving image restoration and compression using a spatial decomposition scheme. Smoothed maximum likelihood is used for local estimation of edge pixels from mixture parametric models of local templates. For the complementary smooth part the traditional L2-variational problem is solved in the Fourier domain with Thin Plate Spline (TPS) regularization. It is well known that naive Fourier compression of the whole image fails to restore a piece-wise smooth noisy image satisfactorily due to Gibbs phenomenon. Images are inte…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Image deblurring has seen a great improvement with the development of deep neural networks. In practice, however, blurry images often suffer from additional degradations such as downscaling and compression. To address these challenges, we propose an Enhanced Deep Pyramid Network (EDPN) for blurry image restoration from multiple degradations, by fully exploiting the self- and cross-scale similarities in the degraded image.Specifically, we design two pyramid-based modules, i.e., the pyramid progressive transfer (PPT) module and the pyramid self-attention (PSA) module, as the main components of t…
A Generative Data Framework with Authentic Supervision for Underwater Image Restoration and Enhancement
Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI), China Telecom（人工智能研究院（TeleAI），中国电信）；Department of Automation, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（自动化系，上海交通大学）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Optics and ElectroNics (iOPEN), Northwestern Polytechnical University（人工智能、光学与电子学学院（iOPEN），西北工业大学）；Xi’an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（西安光学精密机械研究所，中国科学院）
Plug-and-Play optimization recently emerged as a powerful technique for solving inverse problems by plugging a denoiser into a classical optimization algorithm. The denoiser accounts for the regularization and therefore implicitly determines the prior knowledge on the data, hence replacing typical handcrafted priors. In this paper, we extend the concept of plug-and-play optimization to use denoisers that can be parameterized for non-constant noise variance. In that aim, we introduce a preconditioning of the ADMM algorithm, which mathematically justifies the use of such an adjustable denoiser. …
How Powerful Potential of Attention on Image Restoration?
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）
Image demoireing is a multi-faceted image restoration task involving both texture and color restoration. In this paper, we propose a novel multiscale bandpass convolutional neural network (MBCNN) to address this problem. As an end-to-end solution, MBCNN respectively solves the two sub-problems. For texture restoration, we propose a learnable bandpass filter (LBF) to learn the frequency prior for moire texture removal. For color restoration, we propose a two-step tone mapping strategy, which first applies a global tone mapping to correct for a global color shift, and then performs local fine tu…
