Image restoration is commonly applied before object detection under adverse conditions, yet a visually improved image need not improve the downstream task. We study this mismatch as restoration utility prediction: given a degraded image and its candidate restoration, should the restoration be used or should the original observation be preserved? We introduce TaskGuard, a post-hoc controller for frozen restoration and detection pipelines. TaskGuard characterizes the realized restoration residual through its interaction with detector sensitivity and predicts whether the intervention is task-beneficial. Exact regional counterfactuals reveal substantial within-image utility heterogeneity, while a deployable pseudo-gradient preserves statistically reliable directional information. Feature-group ablation further shows that task-conditioned evidence contributes information beyond detector-response and residual statistics. The TaskGuard utility predictor is trained only on Gaussian degradation and frozen before final evaluation, then transferred to unseen motion blur, rain, and defocus. Across these unseen families, TaskGuard reduces lossnegative interventions by 54.2% (family macro) and practical per-image detection deteriorations by 37.0% (pooled), while preserving 98.8% of the Always-Restore COCO AP. On natural-rain DAWN, it reduces loss-negative interventions by 97.9% while retaining 77.8% of the AP improvement obtained by deraining. These results support restoration utility as a task-conditioned property of the specific intervention rather than image appearance alone.
Industrial inspection pipelines often restore a measured image before a detector acts on it, yet restoration can suppress detector-supported defect structure or create clean-region activations. We formulate restoration as a selective action problem over the measured display, five restored candidates, and review. SafeRestore ranks candidates with action-specific fitted scores, chooses a gate on threshold-tuning data, and evaluates the fixed gate on a disjoint certification sample with two one-sided exact binomial bounds: one for the positive-conditional evidence-loss incident rate and one for the all-accepted excess-activation incident rate. The guarantee is marginal for one policy fixed before its certification outcomes are observed, under an image-level i.i.d. working model. In a retrospective split-sample study of 4,591 public Carinthia-S images, the protocol yields auditable risk-coverage behavior. The primary all-action policy passes in one of five training repetitions (12.0% +/- 26.9% pass-gated test coverage when failures count as zero), whereas fixed bicubic and reduced-complexity variants pass more often. On reserved morphologies, evidence-loss incidence rises to 81.1-90.3%, and KolektorSDD lacks both detector competence and enough positive certification images for the stated target. The contribution is therefore an auditable, detector-relative framework for deciding when a transformed image may be returned automatically and when review remains necessary -- not a claim that adaptive routing outperforms simpler policies on the present evidence.
Degraded images not only reduce visual quality but also impair downstream high-level vision tasks. Task-driven image restoration (TDIR) addresses this issue by jointly optimizing restoration quality and task performance. Recent works show that pretrained diffusion priors benefit TDIR, yet diffusion-based restoration is inherently stochastic, as the sampling process depends on a random noise term, which can undermine task consistency. In this paper, we show that a deterministic, noise-free one-step forward pass with pretrained diffusion priors can substantially improve TDIR, but the benefit critically depends on the adaptation module: LoRA yields consistent gains, whereas ControlNet-style conditioning does not. This enables one-step forwarding that surpasses conventional multi-step diffusion TDIR baselines. Furthermore, we introduce a task-preserving GAN training strategy that improves perceptual quality without sacrificing task performance. Extensive experiments on classification, segmentation, and detection demonstrate consistent gains over prior TDIR methods, and we further validate generalization on real-world degraded images and OCR.
Image restoration models are typically trained with a fixed set of capabilities. When new restoration requirements emerge, existing solutions usually train additional models or jointly retrain the original model with both new and historical data. Instead of designing another restoration backbone, we investigate how a trained restorer can continually acquire new capabilities without forgetting those learned previously. We propose RestoreMore, a continual capability-expansion framework that preserves the pretrained restoration model as a frozen capability anchor and learns residual expansion modules for newly arriving degradations. RestoreMore introduces a capability-oriented bi-level routing mechanism at multiple feature stages. The first routing level identifies restoration capabilities relevant to the current input, while the second selects and combines a sparse set of complementary degradation experts. This design enables newly introduced tasks to selectively reuse historical restoration knowledge and progressively enriches the expert bank available for subsequent restoration tasks. Extensive experiments on a wide range of restoration benchmarks demonstrate that RestoreMore consistently acquires new restoration abilities while preserving and improving previously learned capabilities.