Image restoration (IR) is a long-standing task to recover a high-quality image from its corrupted observation. Recently, transformer-based algorithms and some attention-based convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have presented promising results on several IR tasks. However, existing convolutional residual building modules for IR encounter limited ability to map inputs into high-dimensional and non-linear feature spaces, and their local receptive fields have difficulty in capturing long-range context information like Transformer. Besides, CNN-based attention modules for IR either face static abundant parameters or have limited receptive fields. To address the first issue, we propose an efficient residual star module (ERSM) that includes context-aware "star operation" (element-wise multiplication) to contextually map features into exceedingly high-dimensional and non-linear feature spaces, which greatly enhances representation learning. To further boost the extraction of contextual information, as for the second issue, we propose a large dynamic integration module (LDIM) which possesses an extremely large receptive field. Thus, LDIM can dynamically and efficiently integrate more contextual information that helps to further significantly improve the reconstruction performance. Integrating ERSM and LDIM into an U-shaped backbone, we propose a context-aware convolutional network (CCNet) with powerful learning ability for contextual high-dimensional mapping and abundant contextual information. Extensive experiments show that our CCNet with low model complexity achieves superior performance compared to other state-of-the-art IR methods on several IR tasks, including image dehazing, image motion deblurring, and image desnowing.
Tokyo Institute of Technology（东京工业大学）；National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology（日本产业技术综合研究所）
Blind image restoration processors based on convolutional neural network (CNN) are intensively researched because of their high performance. However, they are too sensitive to the perturbation of the degradation model. They easily fail to restore the image whose degradation model is slightly different from the trained degradation model. In this paper, we propose a non-blind CNN-based image restoration processor, aiming to be robust against a perturbation of the degradation model compared to the blind restoration processor. Experimental comparisons demonstrate that the proposed non-blind CNN-ba…
Tokyo Institute of Technology（东京工业大学）；Kadinche Corporation（Kadinche公司）；National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology（国立先进工业科学技术研究所）
Image restoration from a single image degradation type, such as blurring, hazing, random noise, and compression has been investigated for decades. However, image degradations in practice are often a mixture of several types of degradation. Such compositional degradations complicate restoration because they require the differentiation of different degradation types and levels. In this paper, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN) model for estimating the degradation properties of a given degraded image. Furthermore, we introduce an image restoration CNN model that adopts the estimated …
Nanjing University（南京大学）；University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）
Image restoration, including image denoising, super resolution, inpainting, and so on, is a well-studied problem in computer vision and image processing, as well as a test bed for low-level image modeling algorithms. In this work, we propose a very deep fully convolutional auto-encoder network for image restoration, which is a encoding-decoding framework with symmetric convolutional-deconvolutional layers. In other words, the network is composed of multiple layers of convolution and de-convolution operators, learning end-to-end mappings from corrupted images to the original ones. The convoluti…
This study proposes a convolutional nonlinear dictionary (CNLD) for image restoration using cascaded filter banks. Generally, convolutional neural networks (CNN) demonstrate their practicality in image restoration applications; however, existing CNNs are constructed without considering the relationship among atomic images (convolution kernels). As a result, there remains room for discussing the role of design spaces. To provide a framework for constructing an effective and structured convolutional network, this study proposes the CNLD. The backpropagation learning procedure is derived from cer…
We present a fully convolutional network(FCN) based approach for color image restoration. FCNs have recently shown remarkable performance for high-level vision problem like semantic segmentation. In this paper, we investigate if FCN models can show promising performance for low-level problems like image restoration as well. We propose a fully convolutional model, that learns a direct end-to-end mapping between the corrupted images as input and the desired clean images as output. Our proposed method takes inspiration from domain transformation techniques but presents a data-driven task specific…
Also recently, exciting strides forward have been made in the area of image restoration, particularly for image denoising and single image super-resolution. Deep learning techniques contributed to this significantly. The top methods differ in their formulations and assumptions, so even if their average performance may be similar, some work better on certain image types and image regions than others. This complementarity motivated us to propose a novel 3D convolutional fusion (3DCF) method. Unlike other methods adapted to different tasks, our method uses the exact same convolutional network arc…
There have been many discriminative learning methods using convolutional neural networks (CNN) for several image restoration problems, which learn the mapping function from a degraded input to the clean output. In this letter, we propose a self-committee method that can find enhanced restoration results from the multiple trial of a trained CNN with different but related inputs. Specifically, it is noted that the CNN sometimes finds different mapping functions when the input is transformed by a reversible transform and thus produces different but related outputs with the original. Hence averagi…
State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University（南京大学计算机软件新技术国家重点实验室）；School of Computer Science, University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学计算机科学学院）
In this paper, we propose a very deep fully convolutional encoding-decoding framework for image restoration such as denoising and super-resolution. The network is composed of multiple layers of convolution and de-convolution operators, learning end-to-end mappings from corrupted images to the original ones. The convolutional layers act as the feature extractor, which capture the abstraction of image contents while eliminating noises/corruptions. De-convolutional layers are then used to recover the image details. We propose to symmetrically link convolutional and de-convolutional layers with sk…
In this paper, we propose a novel deep convolutional neural network to solve the general multi-modal image restoration (MIR) and multi-modal image fusion (MIF) problems. Different from other methods based on deep learning, our network architecture is designed by drawing inspirations from a new proposed multi-modal convolutional sparse coding (MCSC) model. The key feature of the proposed network is that it can automatically split the common information shared among different modalities, from the unique information that belongs to each single modality, and is therefore denoted with CU-Net, i.e.,…
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…
SkillIR: Evolving Scene-Aware Skills for Agentic Image Restoration
Zhongnan University of Economics and Law（中南财经政法大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）；Dongguan University of Technology（东莞理工学院）；National Institute of Natural Hazards, Ministry of Emergency Management of China（中国应急管理部国家自然灾害防治研究院）
DVANet: Degradation-aware Visual-prior Alignment Network for Image Restoration
School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学计算机学院）；Shenzhen Research Institute of Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学深圳研究院）；State Key Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart City, University of Macau（澳门大学智慧城市物联网国家重点实验室）
Distribution-aware Dataset Distillation for Efficient Image Restoration
Sun Yat‑sen University（中山大学）；Fuzhou University（福州大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）
Due to various and complicated snow degradations, single image desnowing is a challenging image restoration task. As prior arts can not handle it ideally, we propose a novel transformer, SnowFormer, which explores efficient cross-attentions to build local-global context interaction across patches and surpasses existing works that employ local operators or vanilla transformers. Compared to prior desnowing methods and universal image restoration methods, SnowFormer has several benefits. Firstly, unlike the multi-head self-attention in recent image restoration Vision Transformers, SnowFormer inco…
DPMambaIR: All-in-One Image Restoration via Degradation-Aware Prompt State Space Model
School of Information Engineering, Chang’an University（信息工程学院，长安大学）；School of Electronics and Information, Northwestern Polytechnical University（电子与信息学院，西北工业大学）
All-in-one Weather-degraded Image Restoration via Adaptive Degradation-aware Self-prompting Model
School of Computing, Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学计算学院）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳）计算机科学与技术学院）
FAIR: Frequency-aware Image Restoration for Industrial Visual Anomaly Detection
State Key Laboratory for Manufacturing System Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学制造系统工程国家重点实验室）；International Joint Research Laboratory for Micro/Nano Manufacturing and Measurement Technologies, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学微纳制造与测量技术国际联合研究实验室）；Anhui Province Key Laboratory of Machine Vision Inspection, Yangtze River Delta HIT Robot Technology Research Institute（长三角哈工大机器人技术研究院安徽省机器视觉检测重点实验室）
Unifying Heterogeneous Degradations: Uncertainty-Aware Diffusion Bridge Model for All-in-One Image Restoration
School of Intelligent Systems Engineering, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen, Guangdong 518107, China（中山大学智能系统工程学院深圳校区）；Department of Frontier Research, Peng Cheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, Guangdong 518055, China（鹏城实验室前沿研究部）；Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Fire Science and Technology, Guangzhou 510006, China（广东省消防科学与技术重点实验室）
Digital cameras and mobile phones enable us to conveniently record precious moments. While digital image quality is constantly being improved, taking high-quality photos of digital screens still remains challenging because the photos are often contaminated with moiré patterns, a result of the interference between the pixel grids of the camera sensor and the device screen. Moiré patterns can severely damage the visual quality of photos. However, few studies have aimed to solve this problem. In this paper, we introduce a novel multiresolution fully convolutional network for automatically removin…
Technische Universität Dresden（德累斯顿工业大学）；Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Sciences (CIDS)（跨学科数字科学中心）；Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (ScaDS.AI) Dresden/Leipzig（德累斯顿/莱可扩展数据分析与人工智能中心）
Tianjin University（天津大学）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Agency for Science, Technology and Research（新加坡科技研究局）
Images captured under outdoor scenes usually suffer from low contrast and limited visibility due to suspended atmospheric particles, which directly affects the quality of photos. Despite numerous image dehazing methods have been proposed, effective hazy image restoration remains a challenging problem. Existing learning-based methods usually predict the medium transmission by Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), but ignore the key global atmospheric light. Different from previous learning-based methods, we propose a flexible cascaded CNN for single hazy image restoration, which considers the m…
Degradation-Aware Adaptive Context Gating for Unified Image Restoration
School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Southwest Jiaotong University（计算机与人工智能学院，西南交通大学）；Institute for Infocomm Research, Agency for Science, Technology and Research（信息通信研究院，科技研究局）；School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics（计算机与人工智能学院，江西财经大学）；School of Information Management, Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics（信息管理学院，江西财经大学）；Engineering Research Center of Sustainable Urban Intelligent Transportation, Ministry of Education（可持续智慧城市交通工程研究中心，教育部）；National Engineering Laboratory of Integrated Transportation Big Data Application Technology, Southwest Jiaotong University（综合交通运输大数据应用技术国家工程实验室，西南交通大学）
Northeastern University（东北大学）；University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）；Rochester Institute of Technology（罗切斯特理工学院）；Huaqiao University（华侨大学）
Convolutional neural network has recently achieved great success for image restoration (IR) and also offered hierarchical features. However, most deep CNN based IR models do not make full use of the hierarchical features from the original low-quality images, thereby achieving relatively-low performance. In this paper, we propose a novel residual dense network (RDN) to address this problem in IR. We fully exploit the hierarchical features from all the convolutional layers. Specifically, we propose residual dense block (RDB) to extract abundant local features via densely connected convolutional …
Traffic Image Restoration under Adverse Weather via Frequency-Aware Mamba
School of Communication and Information Engineering, Shanghai University（上海大学通信与信息工程学院）；College of Electronic Science, Air Force Aviation University（空军航空大学电子科学学院）；Intelligent Visual Information Perception Laboratory, Institute of Advanced Technology, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications（南京邮电大学先进技术研究院智能视觉信息感知实验室）；School of Computer Science and Technology, East China Normal University（华东师范大学计算机科学与技术学院）
Training-Free Large Model Priors for Multiple-in-One Image Restoration
Hefei Institutes of Physical Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院合肥物质科学研究院）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Xiamen University（厦门大学）
In many applications of deep learning, particularly those in image restoration, it is either very difficult, prohibitively expensive, or outright impossible to obtain paired training data precisely as in the real world. In such cases, one is forced to use synthesized paired data to train the deep convolutional neural network (DCNN). However, due to the unavoidable generalization error in statistical learning, the synthetically trained DCNN often performs poorly on real world data. To overcome this problem, we propose a new general training method that can compensate for, to a large extent, the…
In this paper, we propose a residual non-local attention network for high-quality image restoration. Without considering the uneven distribution of information in the corrupted images, previous methods are restricted by local convolutional operation and equal treatment of spatial- and channel-wise features. To address this issue, we design local and non-local attention blocks to extract features that capture the long-range dependencies between pixels and pay more attention to the challenging parts. Specifically, we design trunk branch and (non-)local mask branch in each (non-)local attention b…
In the past decade, sparsity-driven regularization has led to significant improvements in image reconstruction. Traditional regularizers, such as total variation (TV), rely on analytical models of sparsity. However, increasingly the field is moving towards trainable models, inspired from deep learning. Deep image prior (DIP) is a recent regularization framework that uses a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture without data-driven training. This paper extends the DIP framework by combining it with the traditional TV regularization. We show that the inclusion of TV leads to considerabl…
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学）
The tradeoff between receptive field size and efficiency is a crucial issue in low level vision. Plain convolutional networks (CNNs) generally enlarge the receptive field at the expense of computational cost. Recently, dilated filtering has been adopted to address this issue. But it suffers from gridding effect, and the resulting receptive field is only a sparse sampling of input image with checkerboard patterns. In this paper, we present a novel multi-level wavelet CNN (MWCNN) model for better tradeoff between receptive field size and computational efficiency. With the modified U-Net architec…
Xinjiang University（新疆大学）；Shandong University of Technology（山东理工大学）
Although Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have made good progress in image restoration, the intrinsic equivalence and locality of convolutions still constrain further improvements in image quality. Recent vision transformer and self-attention have achieved promising results on various computer vision tasks. However, directly utilizing Transformer for image restoration is a challenging task. In this paper, we introduce an effective hybrid architecture for sand image restoration tasks, which leverages local features from CNN and long-range dependencies captured by transformer to improve the r…
ClusIR: Towards Cluster-Guided All-in-One Image Restoration
Zhongnan University of Economics and Law（中南财经政法大学）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Yunnan University（云南大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）
LoopMoEVR: Loop-Based Degradation-Aware Mixture-of-Experts for Unified UHD Video Restoration
Shandong Normal University（山东师范大学）；China Academy of Information and Communications Technology（中国信息通信研究院）；Central South University（中南大学）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Hebei University of Technology（河北工业大学）；Shandong University of Finance and Economics（山东财经大学）；National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）
Yonsei University（延世大学）；Chungnam National University（忠南国立大学）
Regularization-based image restoration has remained an active research topic in computer vision and image processing. It often leverages a guidance signal captured in different fields as an additional cue. In this work, we present a general framework for image restoration, called deeply aggregated alternating minimization (DeepAM). We propose to train deep neural network to advance two of the steps in the conventional AM algorithm: proximal mapping and ?- continuation. Both steps are learned from a large dataset in an end-to-end manner. The proposed framework enables the convolutional neural n…
