Image restoration under adverse conditions, such as underwater, haze or fog, and low-light environments, remains a highly challenging problem due to complex physical degradations and severe information loss. Existing datasets are predominantly limited to a single degradation type or heavily rely on synthetic data without stereo consistency, inherently restricting their applicability in real-world scenarios. To address this, we introduce M3D-Stereo, a stereo dataset with 7904 high-resolution image pairs for image restoration research acquired in multiple media with multiple controlled degradation levels. It encompasses four degradation scenarios: underwater scatter, haze/fog, underwater low-light, and haze low-light. Each scenario forms a subset, and is divided into six levels of progressive degradation, allowing fine-grained evaluations of restoration methods with increasing severity of degradation. Collected via a laboratory setup, the dataset provides aligned stereo image pairs along with their pixel-wise consistent clear ground truths. Two restoration tasks, single-level and mixed-level degradation, were performed to verify its validity. M3D-Stereo establishes a better controlled and more realistic benchmark to evaluate image restoration and stereo matching methods in complex degradation environments. It is made public under LGPLv3 license.
Figures & tables
Category
Dataset
Degradation
Resolution
Syn/Real
Size
Aligned
GT
Task
Synthetic
HazyKITTI2012 ( Wang et al., 2024 ; Geiger et al., 2013 )
Haze
1242 × 375
Syn
778
Yes
Yes
Stereo Image Restoration
HazyKITTI2015 ( Wang et al., 2024 ; Geiger et al., 2013 )
Haze
1242 × 375
Syn
800
Yes
Yes
Stereo Image Restoration
LLHolopix50 ( Zhao et al., 2024 )
Low-light
1280 × 720
Syn
1189
Yes
Yes
Stereo Image Restoration
LLFlickr2014 ( Zhao et al., 2024 ; Thomee et al., 2015 )
Low-light
600 × 1696
Syn
391
Yes
Yes
Stereo Image Restoration
LLKitti2015 ( Zhao et al., 2024 ; Menze and Geiger, 2015 )
Figure 1. The M 3 D-Stereo data acquisition platform. (a) Underwater stereo acquisition system: milk is added to the glass tank to simulate underwater scatter at varying concentrations, enabling capturing UWST and UWLL images. (b) Haze stereo acquisition system: a fog machine generates haze scenes of varying density within an enclosed space, enabling the acquisition of HZST and HZLL images. Degradation severity increases along the arrow direction. Two data acquisition setups: (a) underwater system with a glass tank and milk-based scatter simulation, and (b) haze system with a fog machine in an enclosed space. Both use three-axis translation stages, ZED stereo cameras, and ring lights.
Cam
Medium
L rprj (px)
R rprj (px)
dY (px)
1
Air
0.0337
0.0343
0.1604
UW
0.0458
0.0427
0.1250
2
Air
0.0387
0.0382
0.3958
UW
0.0471
0.0544
0.1358
Table 2. Stereo camera calibration accuracy.
Figure 2. Visualization of stereo calibration accuracy. (a) In air; (b) In clear water. Pre and Post denote the left and right image pairs before and after the calibration, respectively.
Level
UWST
UWLL
HZST
HZLL
Milk(ml)
Pairs
Lux
Pairs
Fog(s)
Pairs
Fog(s)
Lux
Pairs
GT
0
(256)
173.7
256
0
(352)
0
141.3
352
D1
250
256
26.7
256
10
352
15
26.7
352
D2
350
256
20.8
256
15
352
15
15.9
352
D3
450
256
15.9
256
20
352
25
26.7
352
D4
550
256
10.5
256
25
352
25
15.9
352
Table 3. Summary of M 3 D-Stereo. Each level specifies the physical control parameter and the stereo image pairs.
Figure 3. Sample images from the M 3 D-Stereo dataset at degradation levels D1–D6. The leftmost column shows the clean GT. All displayed samples correspond to the left view only.(a) Underwater scatter (UWST). (b) Underwater low-light (UWLL). (c) Haze scatter (HZST). (d) Haze low-light (HZLL). Degradation severity increases from D1 to D6. Four rows of sample images from the M2D-Stereo dataset showing progressive degradation from D1 to D6 across underwater scatter, underwater low-light, haze scatter, and haze low-light scenarios, with clean GT on the left. All images correspond to the left view.
Scen
Model
D2
D4
D6
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
UWST
EPRRNet
18.46
0.6316
16.17
0.4989
13.92
0.4059
PSIDNet
21.47
0.7740
19.79
0.6804
17.28
0.5694
UWLL
EPRRNet
24.26
0.8266
23.02
0.8112
19.46
0.7076
PSIDNet
25.06
0.8614
25.08
0.8499
23.20
0.7835
HZST
EPRRNet
21.93
0.7408
17.30
0.5283
16.17
0.4428
Table 4. Restoration results for single-Level degradation.
Figure 4. Restoration examples on the M 3 D-Stereo dataset across four degradation scenarioss. From left to right: UWST, UWLL, HZST, and HZLL. The top row shows the full degraded images, and the bottom row shows zoomed-in comparisons of the red-box regions from: (a) EPRRNet restoration; (b) PSIDNet restoration; (c) clean GT. Four-column comparison of restoration results across UWST, UWLL, HZST, and HZLL degradation types, with full degraded images on top and zoomed-in patches from EPRRNet, PSIDNet, and GT on the bottom.
Scen
Model
Left view
Right view
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
ΔE↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
ΔE↓
UWST
EPRRNet
18.60
0.6194
11.22
19.17
0.6314
11.03
PSIDNet
21.04
0.7348
8.20
21.07
0.7347
8.27
UWLL
EPRRNet
20.61
0.6795
8.77
20.86
0.6790
8.50
PSIDNet
23.23
0.7795
6.36
23.63
0.7814
6.18
HZST
EPRRNet
20.48
0.7380
9.33
20.88
0.7483
9.04
Table 5. Image restoration results for mixed-level degradation. Six levels (D1–D6) were mixed for training and testing.
Figure 5. Impact of image restoration on stereo matching by pretrained FoundationStereo. (a) Degraded input (left view). (b) Depth map from degraded images. (c) Depth map from PSIDNet restored images. (d) Depth map from GTs. Four-panel comparison showing a haze-degraded input and corresponding depth maps from stereo matching on the degraded image, PSIDNet restored image, and clean GT, demonstrating progressive improvement in depth estimation quality.
Image restoration under real-world degradations is critical for downstream tasks such as autonomous driving and object detection. However, existing restoration models are often limited by the scale and distribution of their training data, resulting in poor generalization to real-world scenarios. Recently, large-scale image editing models have shown strong generalization ability in restoration tasks, especially for closed-source models like Nano Banana Pro, which can restore images while preserving consistency. Nevertheless, achieving such performance with those large universal models requires substantial data and computational costs. To address this issue, we construct a large-scale dataset covering nine common real-world degradation types and train a state-of-the-art open-source model to narrow the gap with closed-source alternatives. Furthermore, we introduce RealIR-Bench, which contains 464 real-world degraded images and tailored evaluation metrics focusing on degradation removal and consistency preservation. Extensive experiments demonstrate our model ranks first among open-source methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance.
Yufeng Yang, Xianfang Zeng, Zhangqi Jiang +8
Southern University of Science and Technology · StepFun · Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology
Learning-based stereo matching models struggle in underwater environments due to scarce in-domain data and the difficulty of extracting discriminative correspondences from degraded imagery. In this work, we present AquaStereo, a perception-enhanced framework with a data simulation pipeline and a self-distillation strategy that jointly address data scarcity and feature degradation in underwater stereo matching. First, a depth-conditioned diffusion pipeline renders underwater stereo pairs while preserving binocular geometry, with a lightweight left-right consistency module ensuring geometric alignment. Training on this synthetic corpus effectively narrows the terrestrial-underwater gap and improves zero-shot robustness. Second, a frozen binocular teacher trained on clean terrestrial pairs guides a student exposed to rendered underwater pairs with perturbations. A stage-weighted sequence loss is performed to align the student's disparities with the teacher's geometry, while a clean-branch supervision with shared pseudo targets prevents scale drift. To further enhance feature stability under turbidity and low texture, we introduce learnable perception frames, a perception-enhanced feature formulation that constructs robust matching descriptors by fusing temporal cues from two auxiliary views encoded by a video backbone with semantic features extracted by a strong image encoder. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AquaStereo substantially improves robustness and zero-shot generalization in challenging underwater scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/qz-wei/AquaStereo.
Qizhe Wei, Yingping Liang, Shaodi You +1
Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China · University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Reliable document digitization in uncontrolled capture settings is challenging because real images exhibit multiple interacting degradations rather than a single isolated distortion. Documents thus captured are affected simultaneously by geometric distortions, like page warping, as well as photometric degradations such as non-uniform illumination, and blurring. However, most existing approaches address these factors independently and are evaluated on benchmarks containing only one distortion type, limiting their real-world applicability. We introduce GutenDoc, a large-scale dataset of high-resolution dense-text documents with physically grounded compound degradations. Using physics-based rendering, our dataset jointly models geometric warping and diverse photometric effects, enabling systematic evaluation under realistic capture conditions. We further propose a unified restoration framework that jointly corrects geometric and photometric distortions within a single-network and single-training setup, without the need for degradation-specific retraining or sequential inference passes. Extensive experiments show that our method remains competitive on established single-distortion benchmarks while substantially improving robustness under compound degradations, providing a practical solution for real-world document digitization.
Sujal Burad, Aakanksha, A. N. Rajagopalan +1
Indian Institute of Technology, Madras · Adobe, India