NTIRE 2026 The Second Challenge on Day and Night Raindrop Removal for Dual-Focused Images: Methods and Results

Adherent raindrops on camera lenses are a pervasive source of real-world image degradation, undermining outdoor visual perception for downstream applications such as robotics and 3D scene reconstruction. However, most existing raindrop datasets and methods target only background-focused 2D images, overlooking the equally common raindrop-focused case and the impact of raindrops on 3D scene reconstruction. Moreover, they are almost exclusively daytime, lacking the complex artificial lighting and reflections of nighttime raindrop scenes. To address these issues, we introduce OmniRaindrop, a real-world dataset and benchmark that jointly evaluates 2D raindrop removal and 3D scene reconstruction across raindrop-focused and background-focused captures, under both daytime and nighttime conditions. OmniRaindrop provides spatially aligned raindrop-focused, background-focused, and rain-free ground-truth image sets: a 2D subset of 15,186 aligned pairs/triplets and a 3D subset of 40 real-world scenes evenly split between day and night, totaling 3,822 multi-view images. On top of this data, the benchmark traces how raindrop degradation propagates from 2D restoration to 3D reconstruction by testing representative restoration methods and their effects on pose estimation, point cloud initialization, and 3DGS optimization. Comprehensive experiments reveal that raindrop-focused scenes are substantially harder than background-focused ones, and that errors in 2D restoration and pose/point cloud initialization cascade into degraded 3D reconstruction, pointing to clear directions for more robust 2D restoration and 3DGS design. Building on the dataset, we have organized two consecutive NTIRE challenges (2025 and 2026) on Day and Night Raindrop Removal for Dual-Focused Images.

This workshop paper comprehensively reviews the First Challenge on Unified Removal of Raindrops and Reflections. The challenge aims to address a frequently encountered practical problem in the field of autonomous driving, i.e., raindrop-reflection composite degradation on rainy days. This competition attracted 149 registered participants and received 12 valid final submissions with corresponding fact sheets, significantly contributing to the progress of unified removal of raindrops and reflections. All the methods are developed and evaluated on our real-shot RainDrop and ReFlection (RDRF) dataset. A detailed analysis of the submitted methods and corresponding results is provided in this report, which highlights effective approaches and provides interesting insights for future research.

When capturing images through glass surfaces or windshields on rainy days, raindrops and reflections frequently co-occur to significantly reduce the visibility of captured images. This practical problem lacks attention and needs to be resolved urgently. Prior de-raindrop, de-reflection, and all-in-one models have failed to address this composite degradation. To this end, we first formally define the unified removal of raindrops and reflections (UR$^3$) task for the first time and construct a real-shot dataset, namely RainDrop and ReFlection (RDRF), which provides a new benchmark with substantial, high-quality, diverse image pairs. Then, we propose a novel diffusion-based framework (i.e., DiffUR$^3$) with several target designs to address this challenging task. By leveraging the powerful generative prior, DiffUR$^3$ successfully removes both types of degradations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on our benchmark and on challenging in-the-wild images.