Image Restoration

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Overview

Image restoration estimates cleaner or more complete images from degraded measurements, supporting applications from photography and remote sensing to medical and scientific imaging. Methods range from inverse-problem and physics-based models to CNNs, Transformers, state-space networks, and diffusion or flow models; self-supervised learning and pretrained priors help when clean paired examples are scarce. Work increasingly targets unified models for mixed degradations, real-world adaptation, and efficient deployment, with evaluation extending beyond image metrics to downstream tasks such as detection and diagnosis. A central challenge is balancing fidelity to observed evidence with perceptual quality: generative methods can add plausible but incorrect detail, so reliable control and hallucination assessment remain important.

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372 papers42 papers in the last four weeks, up 27% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

Aug 1, 2026

BRIC-Net: Boundary-Reliable Illumination-Color Interaction for Remote Sensing Image Deshadowing

Shadows in remote sensing images obscure surface appearance and disrupt radiometric continuity, reducing the reliability of visual interpretation and downstream analysis. Remote sensing image deshadowing is an ill-posed inverse problem that requires spatially varying illumination recovery while preserving chromatic and radiometric consistency in non-shadow regions. Existing methods commonly rely on hard shadow masks for compensation or directly regress RGB intensities. Hard masks may inadequately model gradual penumbra variations and are sensitive to localization errors, often producing residual shadows or halo artifacts; direct RGB regression entangles illumination recovery with chromatic reconstruction and can introduce color casts. To this end, we propose the Boundary-Reliable Illumination-Color Interaction Network (BRIC-Net), which decouples these failures at different representation levels. A Lightness Reliability Prior (LRP) derives reliability-aware guidance from CIELAB statistics. Boundary-Adaptive Gated Mixing (BAGM) performs gated interpolation between shallow RGB and lightness features around uncertain transitions, while Spatial-Channel Mutual Modulation (SCMM) coordinates deeper spatial and channel responses for appearance-preserving illumination recovery. BRIC-Net achieves 29.46dB full-image peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) on AeroDS-Syn and 27.96dB on SRGTA. It also obtains the lowest Perception-based Image Quality Evaluator (PIQE) scores on AISD and AeroDS-Real. Region-wise evaluations and component ablations further support its effectiveness in shadow recovery and non-shadow preservation.

Wei Lu, Yi Liu, Si-Bao

MOE Key Lab of ICSP, IMIS Lab of Anhui, Anhui Provincial Key Lab of Multimodal Cognitive Computation, Zenmorn-AHU AI Joint Lab, School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University, Hefei 230601, China

Shadow RemovalImage EnhancementRemote SensingImage Restoration
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Jul 31, 2026

CoDe-SSM: Context-Detail Decoupled State Space Model for Efficient UHD Image Restoration

Ultra-high-definition (UHD) image restoration must balance the aggregation of spatially recurring degradation cues with the preservation of localized image structures. Compact aggregation can reduce redundant processing but may attenuate edges, textures, and other fine structures. Existing approaches manage UHD restoration cost through downsampling, window partitioning, or cluster-based token reduction; yet many of them do not explicitly retain information that is poorly represented by shared aggregation. In this study, we propose a Context-Detail Decoupled State Space Model (CoDe-SSM) for UHD restoration, which processes aggregated context and clustering residuals in separate pathways. The context modeling pathway, implemented by the Global Cluster Scan Module (GCSM), aggregates features into KK input-dependent cluster centers and applies selective SSM reasoning over the resulting fixed-order sequence, enabling cross-region context sharing while decoupling computational cost from spatial resolution. The detail recovery pathway, implemented by the Local High-Frequency Module (LHFM), processes the clustering residual with an input-derived high-frequency mask and a sparse mixture of convolutional experts. Extensive experiments on five UHD benchmarks and five degradation types demonstrate that our explicit context-detail decoupling strategy yields substantial gains in restoration quality while maintaining desirable efficiency.

Jiaxu Su, Zhijian Wu, Jun Li +2

School of Computer and Electronic Information, Nanjing Normal University, China · Medical Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Westlake University, China

Visual SSMsImage RestorationImage Super-Resolution
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Jul 31, 2026

FDIR: Harmonizing Fidelity and Human-Machine Preference in Lossy Compression Image Restoration

Image restoration quality can be evaluated along three complementary facets: pixel-level fidelity, human perception, and downstream machine preference. However, existing lossy compression restoration methods optimize for at most one of these criteria: fidelity-oriented models often regress toward conditional means and produce over-smoothed outputs, while generative approaches hallucinate plausible but factually incorrect textures that degrade both ground-truth fidelity and downstream task accuracy. To navigate this three-way tradeoff, we propose FDIR, a two-stage architecture that decouples the conflicting demands through complementary inductive biases: Quality-Guided One-Step Flow Matching (QO-Flow) recovers global semantic structure in latent space via a single forward pass, while Flow-Conditioned Detail Refinement (FCDR) deterministically restores high-frequency textures and suppresses generative hallucinations in pixel space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FDIR achieves superior fidelity, with a favorable perceptual-fidelity balance and competitive machine preference.

Kuan-Yen Chen, Fang-Yi Su, Philip Chikontwe +1

Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan · Department of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

Flow MatchingImage Restoration
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Jul 30, 2026

What to Remove, What to Preserve: Dual-Ambiguity Rectification for All-in-One Image Restoration

All-in-one image restoration aims to handle diverse degradations within a unified framework. Existing methods commonly encode heterogeneous degradation conditions in a shared latent space, where degradation-related cues and scene content can remain entangled. We characterize the resulting challenge as dual ambiguity: semantic ambiguity in channel-wise modulation and spatial ambiguity in restoration responses, which can lead to content corruption and residual artifacts. To mitigate this issue, we propose DAR-Net, a Dual-Ambiguity Rectification Network for all-in-one image restoration. DAR-Net first introduces a Degradation Archetype Representation (DAR) module to construct a structured degradation state through simplex-constrained archetype mixture modeling. Based on this state, a Semantic Ambiguity Rectification (SeAR) module generates degradation-aware prompts to improve channel-wise conditioning in the decoder. A Spatial Ambiguity Rectification (SpAR) module further regularizes degradation-aware and complementary features toward orthogonal response subspaces, reducing spatial interference between removal and preservation cues. Extensive experiments on standard all-in-one restoration benchmarks show that DAR-Net achieves the best overall performance under both three-degradation and five-degradation settings, improving the average PSNR over the strongest competitor by 0.14 dB and 0.34 dB, respectively; it additionally shows superior performance on CDD-11 and WeatherBench.

Cencen Liu, Wen Yin, Dongyang Zhang +6

University of Electronic Science and Technology of China · University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan, China · Jiigan Technology +1

Representation LearningRepresentation DisentanglementAll-in-One Image RestorationImage RestorationDegradation-Aware Image Restoration
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Jul 30, 2026

CoRE-UIR: Prior-guided common and residual experts for efficient all-in-one remote sensing image restoration

Remote sensing images acquired by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and satellites are often degraded by adverse weather, illumination variation, and imaging artifacts, which may co-occur and jointly induce global distribution shifts and local structural corruption. Although All-in-One image restoration offers an appealing unified alternative to task-specific pipelines, existing methods still suffer from weak or implicit degradation cues and parameter redundancy caused by full-rank multi-expert designs with overlapping restoration behaviors. We propose CoRE-UIR (Common and Residual Experts for Universal Image Restoration), a prior-guided global-local framework centered on the Common-and-Residual Expert Block (CoRE). CoRE explicitly decomposes restoration capacity into a common dense expert for degradation-invariant restoration and low-rank residual experts for degradation-specific compensation, enabling adaptive specialization without redundant expert replication. Built on this design, Degradation Prior Embedding (DPE) adapts frozen CLIP features into an explicit restoration-oriented prior, while Global Feature Modulation (GFM) aligns global feature statistics before local residual compensation. We also construct MDVD-108K (Multi-Degradation VisDrone), a large-scale UAV restoration dataset covering both single and compound degradations, together with a real-world test set. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets show that CoRE-UIR improves the overall average PSNR by 1.05 dB while running 11.83×\times faster and reducing peak memory by 85.3% relative to the strongest baseline, BaryIR, thereby maintaining a favorable quality-efficiency trade-off. Evaluations on downstream tasks and unseen degradation also validate the generalizability of CoRE-UIR. The code and dataset will be released at https://github.com/zzaiyan/CoRE-UIR.

Zaiyan Zhang, Qiangqiang Yuan, Jie Li +5

School of Geodesy and Geomatics, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, Hubei, China · School of Artificial Intelligence, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, Hubei, China · State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, Hubei, China

Mixture of ExpertsAll-in-One Image RestorationImage RestorationDegradation-Aware Image Restoration
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Jul 29, 2026

FreeShadow: Training-Free Shadow Removal via Illumination Transfer and Selective Content Preservation in Diffusion Models

Existing supervised and unsupervised shadow removal methods often suffer from limited generalization due to the insufficient diversity of available training datasets, while zero-shot methods tend to produce artifacts and require time-consuming test-time optimization. To address these issues, we propose FreeShadow, a training-free shadow removal method built upon pretrained diffusion models, which exploits diffusion priors for shadow removal without any training or optimization. For illumination recovery, we propose an illumination transfer attention (ITA), which re-weights the self-attention maps in diffusion model to transfer illumination cues from non-shadow to shadow regions. For content preservation, we analyze the effects of illumination variations on self-attention maps and latent high-frequency features in diffusion model, and selectively preserve illumination-invariant components to maintain content fidelity while suppressing residual shadows. We further propose local texture-preserving relighting (LTPR) to mitigate local texture misalignment caused by VAE compression. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves strong generalization and produces realistic shadow-free images.

Yinan Wang, Yan Huang, Yong Xu +1

School of Computer Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510006, China · Pazhou Lab, Guangzhou 510005, China · Polytech Nantes, Universit´e de Nantes, Nantes 44306, France

Diffusion Models for Image RestorationShadow RemovalAttention Control in Diffusion ModelsImage Restoration
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Jul 28, 2026

Noise-Free One-Step LoRA for Task-Driven Image Restoration with Diffusion Priors

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.

Jaeha Kim, Kyoung Mu Lee

Dept. of ECE & ASRI, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea · IPAI, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea

Diffusion Models for Image RestorationLow-Rank AdaptationImage RestorationDiffusion-Based Inverse ProblemsDiffusion Model Inference AccelerationDiffusion-Based Denoising
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Jul 27, 2026

Image Inpainting via Stochastic Dynamics

Image inpainting aims to recover missing regions while preserving structural consistency. We propose a non-parametric method without network training based on data-guided stochastic dynamics. Starting from a masked image, the missing pixels are evolved through a reverse-time stochastic differential equation with a kernel-weighted correction estimated directly from a reference dataset. This empirical correction guides the reconstruction toward high-density regions of the data distribution without training a neural network or fitting a parametric density model. Experiments on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and MVTec show that the proposed method outperforms Mean Fill, Telea, and Navier-Stokes inpainting in PSNR, SSIM, and visual quality. On CelebA, it remains competitive and produces plausible completions for structure-sensitive occlusions. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of empirical reference statistics as a non-parametric prior for image inpainting.

Jiaqi Kuang, Zihao Guo, Zhongmin Qian

Oxford Suzhou Centre for Advanced Research, University of Oxford, Suzhou, China · Institute for Advanced Research, Great Bay University, Dongguan, Guangdong, China · Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, Andrew Wiles Building, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Oxford, OX2 6GG, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom

Image RestorationImage Inpainting
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Jul 23, 2026

Causal-AgentIR: Self-Evolving Causal Memory for Adaptive Image Restoration Agents

Image restoration agents have recently emerged as a flexible paradigm for handling diverse and unpredictable degradations in real-world scenarios. Existing agents typically formulate restoration as a tool-using process, where the agent perceives degradations, searches candidate tools, executes restoration operations, and revises the plan through reflection or rollback. However, their knowledge is often stored as static tool descriptions, manually defined degradation priors, or unstructured textual summaries, which limits the accumulation, verification, revision, and forgetting of restoration knowledge over long-term experience. In this paper, we propose Causal-AgentIR, a hierarchical multi-agent framework with self-evolving causal memory for collective image restoration intelligence. Instead of representing restoration experience as isolated textual records, Causal-AgentIR organizes degradation patterns, image regions, restoration tools, actions, quality changes, and user preferences into a structured causal memory graph. This graph supports graph-based retrieval and multi-hop causal reasoning, enabling agents to infer how specific restoration operations or tool sequences affect restoration quality under different degradation conditions. The framework further organizes multiple agents into a collaborative system, including planning, degradation analysis, tool expertise, causal memory reasoning, outcome critique, and memory curation. Through this design, restoration experience can be added, updated, merged, reinforced, ignored, or discarded according to observed quality changes and feedback, allowing the agent to maintain reliable and transferable restoration knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Hu Gao, Yulong Chen, Lizhuang Ma

Department of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China · Department of Architecture and Design, Harbin Institute of Technology, Heilongjiang, China

Image RestorationMulti-Agent ReasoningMemory-Augmented Agents
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Jul 23, 2026

The Second LoViF 2026 Challenge on Real-World All-in-One Image Restoration: Methods and Results

This paper presents a review of the second LoViF Challenge on Real-World All-in-One Image Restoration. The challenge aims to advance unified image restoration under diverse real-world degradation conditions, including blur, low-light, haze, rain, and snow. It provides a common benchmark for evaluating the restoration accuracy, robustness, and generalization capability of models across multiple degradation categories within a unified framework. The competition attracted 158 registered participants, and 20 teams were included in the final ranking after their submitted results were successfully reproduced and verified. This report provides a comprehensive analysis of the submitted solutions and corresponding results, highlighting recent advances in real-world all-in-one image restoration. The summarized methods and empirical findings reveal effective design strategies and establish an updated benchmark for future research in real-world low-level vision.

Xiang Chen, Hao Li, Jiangxin Dong +89

Image Corruption RobustnessAll-in-One Image RestorationImage Restoration
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Jul 23, 2026

The RealDefocus Benchmark for Defocus Deblurring

Single-Image Defocus Deblurring (SIDD) aims to recover an all-in-focus image from a single defocused observation, but rigorous and reproducible evaluation remains challenging due to the scarcity of realistic, high-resolution datasets with well-aligned defocused/sharp pairs and standardized protocols. We build on RealDefocus, a benchmark derived from the real-world RealBokeh dataset originally proposed for Bokeh Rendering. RealDefocus provides paired defocused inputs and sharp ground truth images, predefined training/validation/test splits, and a unified evaluation framework for comparing image restoration and neural rendering approaches. We further outline a benchmarking protocol with cross-dataset validation to assess reconstruction quality and generalization. The project page is publicly available at: www.github.com/TimSeizinger/RealDefocus-Benchmark.

Tim Seizinger, Zhuyun Zhou, Radu Timofte

Computer Vision Lab, CAIDAS & IFI, University of Würzburg, Germany

Image DeblurringImage Restoration
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Jul 20, 2026

LowAux-RDNet: Low-Pass Residual Supervision with Scene-Balanced Real-World Training for Single-Image Reflection Removal

Single-image reflection removal aims to recover a clean transmission layer from one image captured through glass. We study an explicit decomposition pipeline built on RDNet and introduce LowAux, a training-only low-pass reflection auxiliary objective. The original residual target remains the main reflection supervision, while symmetrically filtered prediction and target provide a stable low-frequency constraint. We further incorporate scene-balanced real pairs from RRW to broaden real-scene coverage and improve cross-dataset generalization. To avoid evaluation discrepancies caused by model-specific resizing, padding, output quantization, and metric code, we build a unified public benchmark over CEILNet, Real20, Postcard, Objects, and Wild. Under the same evaluator, the proposed system obtains a five-dataset macro average of 27.546 dB PSNR, 0.9220 SSIM, 0.9751 NCC, and 0.004760 LMSE, achieving the highest macro-average PSNR, SSIM, and NCC and the lowest LMSE among the compared public checkpoints and internal variants. Per-dataset and qualitative analyses show that the main benefit is a more balanced performance across diverse reflection distributions, while clear semantic reflections in Postcard remain challenging.

Jizhong Li

Fudan University

Single-Image Reflection RemovalImage Restoration
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Jul 20, 2026

Reviving Ancient Paintings via Poem: A Colorization Framework for Aligning Cultural Semantics

The irreversible fading of ancient paintings disrupts the "congruence between poems and paintings", a core aesthetic principle where visual imagery harmonizes with literary inscriptions. Although diffusion models provide strong generative priors, restoring historically faithful colors remains difficult: visual restoration is inherently ambiguous, while direct text guidance often causes modern semantic bias, over-saturation, and cross-boundary color leakage. To address this, we propose PoemColor, a poem-guided ancient painting colorization framework. Our method aligns poetic cultural semantics with painting restoration through two key designs. First, the Poetic Painting Projector (P3) converts implicit poetic context into a classical color-aware condition via poem-to-palette pretraining, reducing the ambiguity of poem-to-color mapping. Second, Structure-Aware Semantic Attention (SASA) regulates how poetic color semantics are injected into the diffusion backbone by jointly controlling their propagation direction and regional injection strength. In addition, we construct a hybrid restoration dataset that integrates synthetic degradation with expert-restored artifacts, providing both scalable supervision and real classical color references. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, delivering controllable colorization that revives both historical authenticity and poetic semantics.

Junming Gao, Biao Zhu, Xiaosong Wang +1

Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China · Hangzhou Research Institute of AI and Holographic Technology, Hangzhou, China

Diffusion Models for Image RestorationImage-to-Image TranslationImage Restoration
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Jul 16, 2026

QuReC: All-in-One Image Restoration with Query-Specific Guidance and Local-Global Response Calibration

All-in-one image restoration aims to recover clean images degraded by multiple corruption types using a single unified model. Existing methods typically rely on image-level prompts or shared guidance to handle diverse degradations. However, such a paradigm becomes inadequate when degradations are spatially heterogeneous or even coexist in mixed forms within a single image. Yet spatially adaptive guidance alone is not sufficient, since accurate restoration also requires each spatial query to reliably aggregate complementary information from local neighborhoods and global contexts. To this end, we propose QuReC, a unified framework for all-in-one image restoration. QuReC consists of a Degradation-Guided Query Reconstruction Module (DQRM) and a Local-Global Response Calibration Module (LGRCM). Specifically, DQRM matches each spatial query against a degradation prototype space to reconstruct a query-specific degradation-aware representation, thereby providing fine-grained spatially adaptive restoration guidance. To further stabilize this query-wise matching process, we introduce a weakly supervised prototype matching learning strategy to improve optimization stability and degradation semantic consistency. Meanwhile, LGRCM performs local-global dual-branch aggregation and calibrates the aggregated responses with learnable priors, improving the reliability of feature aggregation and the coordination between local detail modeling and global context modeling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that QuReC achieves superior performance on multiple all-in-one image restoration benchmarks. The code is released at https://github.com/zhoushen1/QuReC.

Shen Zhou, Jinghui Zhang, Wenbo Huang +7

Southeast University Nanjing, China · Hainan University Hainan, China

All-in-One Image RestorationImage RestorationDegradation-Aware Image Restoration
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Jul 13, 2026

Backbone-Agnostic Stochastic Perturbation Learning for End-to-End Real-World Image Dehazing

Real-world paired image dehazing remains challenging because haze degradation is spatially non-uniform, illumination-dependent, and physically ambiguous even when haze-free references are available. Existing end-to-end restoration networks usually learn a deterministic mapping from a hazy observation to a clean target, while degradation-sensitive feature responses, reverse haze-formation consistency, and cross-domain negative structure remain insufficiently exploited. In this paper, we propose Backbone-Agnostic Stochastic Perturbation Learning (BSPL), a plug-and-play framework for end-to-end real-world image dehazing. BSPL first introduces a Learnable Stochastic Perturbation Modulator (LSPM), which learns input-conditioned channel-wise and spatial-wise perturbation distributions and converts the resulting feature-response discrepancies into adaptive modulation weights. It then develops a Prior-informed Perturbation-guided Reconstruction Module (PPRM), which reuses the learned bottleneck perturbations together with transmission and atmospheric-light priors to reconstruct the hazy observation from the restored result and enforce degradation consistency. Furthermore, we propose a Dual-space Domain-diversified Distribution-aware Contrastive Loss (D3D^3CL) to regularize both clean restoration and hazy reconstruction spaces with real-world and synthetic negatives. Experiments on five real-world paired benchmarks show that BSPL consistently improves multiple representative backbones with only marginal additional inference overhead.

Bingcai Wei

School of Computer Science Wuhan University Wuhan, Hubei, China

Image RestorationImage Dehazing
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Jul 13, 2026

DDR-Net: Haze-Aware Dual-Domain Refinement for Single-Image Dehazing

Single-image dehazing aims to recover clear scenes from haze-degraded images. It remains challenging due to the atmospheric scattering and the complexity of real-world haze distributions. Although recent end-to-end networks have achieved promising performance, two issues still limit their effectiveness: insufficient feature refinement at the bottleneck stage and weak local structural representation in encoder-decoder architectures. Thus, we propose a Haze-Aware Dual-Domain Refinement Network (DDR-Net) for single-image dehazing. Our method is built upon three modules: Haze Prior Extractor (HPE) provides multi-scale haze-aware priors by operating directly on downsampled hazy images; Detail-Enhanced Blocks (DE Blocks) serve as the core feature extraction units, capturing multi-scale structural information and enhancing edge and texture recovery via gradient-aware convolutions; and Spatial-Frequency Bottleneck Refinement (SFBR) at the bottleneck jointly exploits spatial and frequency information to refine bottleneck features. DDR-Net achieves more effective feature representation and reconstruction for haze removal. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms existing dehazing approaches. It achieves competitive performance on synthetic datasets.

Xinye Zheng, Ye Yu, Qiang Lu +3

School of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, China

Image RestorationImage Dehazing
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Jul 7, 2026

FADRA: Frequency-Aware Diffusion with Residual Adaptation for Video Face Restoration

Video face restoration (VFR) aims to recover high-quality and temporally consistent facial details from severely degraded video sequences; however, existing methods still struggle to balance spatial fidelity and temporal coherence under complex degradations. To address this, we propose FADRA, a frequency-aware diffusion framework with iterative residual adaptation specifically tailored for robust VFR. We first leverage the strong temporal consistency of a pre-trained text-to-video diffusion model and introduce lightweight LoRA adapters together with a Low-Quality (LQ) Pixel-Alignment Feature Fusion module to efficiently adapt the frozen generative prior to the VFR task. To further adapt the frozen diffusion backbone to the downstream VFR task beyond LoRA-based adaptation, we introduce a Repeated Residual Adaptation Head (RRAH) for step-wise residual refinement after the diffusion backbone. To make this refinement explicitly guided by the degraded observation, RRAH further takes the LQ latent together with the current velocity prediction as input, allowing the model to repeatedly revisit LQ cues and predict residual updates at each flow-matching step. This LQ-guided repeated residual adaptation helps recover fine facial details while preserving the inherent temporal priors of the pre-trained model. Furthermore, to ensure the structural integrity of perceptually important details, we introduce a Frequency-Aware Loss that provides explicit supervision across multiple spectral bands, emphasizing visually sensitive frequency components that are crucial for perceptual quality and prone to temporal jittering. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FADRA recovers better facial structures and produces more temporally consistent videos than state-of-the-art methods, leading to clear gains in both quantitative metrics and visual perception. Our project page is available.

Jin Jiang, Jia Wang, Panwen Hu +2

College of Information Technology (CIT), United Arab Emirates University (UAEU), Al Ain, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates · State Key Laboratory of Physical Oceanography and the Faculty of Information Science and Engineering, Ocean University of China (OUC), Shandong, 266100, China · Computer Vision Department, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

Diffusion Model AdaptationVideo Diffusion ModelsImage RestorationVideo RestorationDiffusion Models
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Jul 3, 2026

ExpoMotion: A Large-Scale Benchmark and A Householder Projection Network for Multi-Exposure Fusion

Multi-Exposure Fusion (MEF) effectively extends dynamic range, but practical deployment is hindered by motion-induced ghosting and the scarcity of high-quality dynamic benchmarks. Current benchmarks largely neglect dynamic scenes and lack reliable ground truth, making it difficult to handle the complexity of real-world motions. In response, we introduce ExpoMotion, a large-scale benchmark designed to evaluate deghosting capabilities. Comprising 1,738 sequences and 10,909 images across diverse environments, it covers a wide range of motions and provides high-fidelity GTs constructed through an expert-guided acquisition pipeline. To tackle the complex dynamics and extreme conditions captured in this benchmark, we propose the Householder Orthogonal Projection network (HOP), which revisits MEF deghosting from a mathematical perspective via Householder transformation, decoupling multi-frame alignment into exposure pre-alignment and ghost filtering. Specifically, the Global Priors Illumination Alignment (GPIA) module first rectifies drastic dynamic range discrepancies by utilizing global statistics for exposure harmonization. Regarding ghost removal, our Householder Orthogonal Attention (HOA) models artifacts as orthogonal perturbations. By employing a dynamic Householder reflector, HOA effectively projects ghosts out of the feature manifold while preserving high-frequency details. Experiments demonstrate that our ExpoMotion dataset enables superior generalization and artifact-free detail restoration, while also validating the effectiveness and efficiency of the HOP method. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/Leo-LiuYao/ExpoMotion.

Yao Liu, Lishen Qu, Shihao Zhou +6

Nankai International Advanced Research Institute (SHENZHEN·FUTIAN) · College of Computer Science, Nankai University · OPPO Research Institute +2

HDR ImagingImage RestorationMulti-Exposure Image Fusion
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Jul 3, 2026

CURE: Controllable Unified Image Restoration for Complex Degradations

The presence of composite degradations poses a significant challenge, since the underlying corruption factors exhibit complex and interdependent interactions. Even when the degradation types are known, accurately restoring the image remains difficult due to the intertwined nature of their effects and the need for selective control during the recovery process. To address this, we introduce CURE, a unified framework that enables controllable restoration in complex degradation settings by learning disentangled and adjustable representations. CURE is driven by four complementary objectives. First, an identity embedding is incorporated, along with a reconstruction constraint, to ensure that the model can reproduce the input image when restoration is unnecessary. Second, the ratio control mechanism blends the identity embedding with degradation-specific embeddings using user-regulated mixing ratios, allowing continuous control over restoration intensity. Third, an intermediate loss is applied to supervise stepwise outputs, each encouraged to tackle the removal of only a single degradation factor within a composite mixture. Finally, a permutation-invariant loss ensures that the model achieves consistent restoration quality regardless of the order in which multiple degradations are addressed. Since CURE modifies only the training strategy and not the underlying network architecture, it can be seamlessly integrated into existing controllable restoration models. Experiments demonstrate that CURE delivers state-of-the-art performance on composite degradation benchmarks, while enabling both selective and jointly fused restoration through flexible modulation of embedding ratios. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/bo-oseng/CURE.

Boseong Kim, Donghyeon Cho

Department of Computer Science, Hanyang University, Seoul, South Korea

Disentangled Representation LearningAll-in-One Image RestorationImage RestorationDegradation-Aware Image Restoration
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Jul 3, 2026

ReLo-IRR: Reflection-Guided LoRA Framework for Image Reflection Removal

Single-image reflection removal (SIRR) aims to recover the clean transmission layer from a reflection-contaminated image. Although recent methods achieve promising results with large diffusion models, they rely on image-agnostic adaptation strategies, e.g., fine-tuning or ControlNet, that enforce uniform suppression regardless of reflection severity. As a result, heavy reflections often leave residuals, while weak ones suffer from detail loss. To this end, we propose ReLo-IRR, a reflection-guided LoRA framework built upon the rectified flow model. First, a lightweight estimator is designed to predict the reflection strength descriptor, providing an explicit prior of reflection dominance for each image and enabling image-dependent LoRA modulation. Second, we introduce a time-conditioned mechanism that fuses this reflection descriptor with timestep embeddings, enabling LoRA modulation to evolve consistently with the coarse-to-fine denoising process. By jointly modeling reflection strength and denoising dynamics, our ReLo-IRR achieves robust suppression of diverse reflection conditions. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmarks validate the effectiveness of ReLo-IRR, demonstrating superior dereflection performance and robust generalization. The code is released at https://github.com/KONGBAI-8080/ReLo-IRR.

Chaoqun Wang, Yuehuan Wei, Haoxiang Cao +1

School of Artificial Intelligence, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China · University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China

Diffusion Models for Image RestorationSingle-Image Reflection RemovalLow-Rank AdaptationImage Restoration
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Jul 3, 2026

Pooling-Based Context Modeling for Convolution-Free Deep Image Prior

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) achieve strong denoising performance by exploiting spatial context from neighboring pixels. Deep Image Prior (DIP) leverages this property to restore images from a single noisy input without requiring large datasets. However, the over-parameterized architecture of DIP often leads to noise fitting during optimization. In this paper, we propose Pool-DIP, a convolution-free architecture that incorporates pooling-based contrast modeling to capture spatial context efficiently. Pool-DIP improves denoising performance while significantly reducing the number of parameters and computational complexity compared to convolution-based DIP models. Experimental results show that Pool-DIP achieves competitive performance across multiple datasets, including a real-world benchmark. Spectral analysis further reveals that Pool-DIP stabilizes the evolution of high-frequency components during optimization and suppresses erroneous high-frequency signals. The proposed architecture also generalizes well to other image restoration tasks such as super-resolution and inpainting.

Gihyun Kim, Jong-Seok Lee

Yonsei University Republic of Korea

Deep Image PriorImage RestorationConvolutional Neural NetworksImage Denoising
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Jul 2, 2026

Interpretation-Oriented Cloud Removal via Observation-Anchored Residual Flow with Geo-Contextual Alignment

Cloud removal (CR) is essential for optical remote sensing, serving as a prerequisite for reliable downstream interpretation, such as semantic segmentation and change detection. However, existing CR approaches often prioritize visual realism while overlooking their impact on subsequent analytical tasks, leading to semantic drift and degraded downstream performance. To address this issue, we propose Geo-Anchored Cloud Removal (GACR), a unified framework that jointly ensures faithful reconstruction and robust interpretability. At its core, GACR incorporates Observation-Anchored Residual Flow (OAR-Flow), which reformulates CR as a physically grounded residual inversion process. By anchoring the generative trajectory to the cloudy observation rather than pure noise, OAR-Flow enables fast, stable, and faithful reconstruction. To further preserve semantic structures critical for downstream interpretation, GACR integrates Geo-Contextual Prior Alignment (GCPA) to constrain the reconstruction within a semantic manifold induced by a Vision Foundation Model (VFM). Consequently, GACR strictly maintains the spatial-semantic integrity of complex landscapes. Extensive experiments across six CR datasets and twelve downstream tasks demonstrate that GACR produces superior reconstruction quality while consistently improving downstream task accuracy. The code is available at https://github.com/wzy6055/GACR.

Ziyao Wang, Maonan Wang, Yucheng He +5

School of Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Shenzhen, China · Shanghai Ai Lab, Shanghai, China · Faculty of Geosciences and Engineering, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu,2026 China

Residual LearningImage RestorationCloud Removal
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Jul 2, 2026

SE-UNet: Singular Equivariant Imaging for Real-World Constrained Generation

While diffusion models have revolutionized image synthesis, their application to real-world inverse problems is often hampered by the need for massive datasets and the difficulty of imposing strict physical constraints. In this work, we introduce SE-UNet (Singular Equivariant UNet), a framework designed to solve ill-posed imaging tasks without extensive pre-training. By treating generation as an optimization problem constrained by geometric equivariance (D4D_4 group) and singular value gating, SE-UNet effectively standardizes the solution space. We demonstrate that these strong inductive biases allow for state-of-the-art zero-shot inpainting results (80% missing pixels) on CIFAR-10. Our method surpasses Deep Image Prior (DIP) baselines by over 4 dB in PSNR and exhibits a characteristic "singular snap" convergence -- rapidly locking into the signal manifold. SE-UNet thus offers a data-efficient pathway for constrained generation, aligning with the ReALM-GEN goal of bridging theoretical priors with practical deployment.

Kanishk Awadhiya

Independent Researcher

Constrained Generative ModelingEquivariant Neural NetworksImage RestorationImage InpaintingInverse Problems
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Jul 1, 2026

CPDDNet: Color-Polarization Denoising and Demosaicking Network

Color-polarization imaging using a color-polarization filter array (CPFA) sensor captures both texture (color intensity) and physical (polarization) information of the scene in a single shot, enabling various applications in computer vision. However, the raw mosaic output from a CPFA sensor often suffers from severe noise and resolution loss, especially under low-light conditions. Existing methods generally focus on either denoising or demosaicking tasks, failing to capture the coupling between them and neglecting shared low-level features. In this paper, we propose a color-polarization denoising and demosaicking network (CPDDNet), which is a joint framework that performs noise removal and CPFA interpolation using a feature fusion module that retains the features from the CPFA raw data at both the denoising and the demosaicking stages. Experimental results demonstrate that CPDDNet significantly enhances image quality and polarization parameter accuracy, outperforming existing approaches on a real dataset.

Qihang Zhang, Yusuke Monno, Masayuki Tanaka +1

Institute of Science Tokyo

Image ReconstructionImage RestorationPolarimetric ImagingImage DenoisingDemosaicing
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Jun 30, 2026

MG-SpaIR: Multi-grade Sparse-guided Implicit Representation for Training-Data-Free Image Restoration

MG-SpaIR is a training-data-free framework for restoring a clean image from a single observation corrupted by a mixture of blur, downsampling, noise, and missing pixels. Building on implicit neural representations (INRs), we introduce a multi-grade coarse-to-fine residual hierarchy that progressively refines the reconstruction across resolution grades, improving representational fidelity and mitigating spectral limitations. To stabilize reconstruction optimization and suppress INR-induced artifacts, we further propose an explicit sparse proximal regularization (e.g., ℓ0\ell_0-type) applied directly in the high-resolution image domain, which discourages spurious high-frequency patterns while preserving sharp structures. The resulting optimization is solved efficiently via a multi-grade proximal alternating scheme, and we establish convergence guarantees for the associated updates under standard regularity conditions. Experiments on mixed-degradation benchmarks demonstrate that MG-SpaIR consistently outperforms strong training-data-free baselines such as Deep Image Prior, providing a stable, interpretable, and data-efficient alternative to conventional learning-based restoration methods.

Jianmin Liao, Lei Huang, Ronglong Fang +3

Department of Mathematics, Syracuse University, 215 Carnegie Building, Syracuse, 13210, NY, USA. · Department of Mathematics & Statistics, Old Dominion University, 2300 Engineering & Computational Sciences Building, Norfolk, 23529, VA, USA. · Department of Medical Physical, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, 1250 First Avenue, New York, 10065, NY, USA. +1

Implicit Neural RepresentationsAll-in-One Image RestorationImage Restoration
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Jun 30, 2026

PRISM: Latent Composition Consistency for Single-Image Reflection Removal

Single-image reflection removal (SIRR) seeks to recover the transmission layer from a mixture corrupted by reflections -- a severely ill-posed problem. Existing methods operate in pixel space, where the nonlinear sRGB formation model entangles the two layers and limits generalization. We observe that pretrained VAE latent spaces exhibit substantially lower coherence between image layers compared to pixel space, providing a more favorable working space for decomposition. Building on this finding, we propose PRISM (Pretrained-latent Reflection Image Separation Model), which reinterprets SIRR as a latent linear separation problem. Under an approximate additive formulation in latent space, PRISM learns a flow matching velocity field on a pretrained FLUX backbone that recovers both transmission and reflection in a single forward pass. To enforce robust disentanglement, we introduce a Latent Composition Consistency (LCC) strategy that constructs synthetic mixtures by swapping reflection latents across samples and enforces consistent decomposition via a cycle loss. We further propose a Layer Contrastive Separation (LCS) loss that promotes semantic separation between layers through patch-level contrastive learning, without requiring explicit reflection targets. Experiments on six benchmarks demonstrate that PRISM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods by significant margins, with strong generalization to in-the-wild images.

Junseong Shin, Tae Hyun Kim

Department of Artificial Intelligence, Hanyang University, Seoul, South Korea · Department of Computer Science, Hanyang University, Seoul, South Korea

Single-Image Reflection RemovalImage Restoration
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Jun 30, 2026

RCL-Mamba: A Dual-domain State Space Model for Measurement-oriented Image Restoration in Rotational Sparse-View Scanning Computed Laminography

Rotational Scanning Computed Laminography (RCL) is widely utilized for the Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) of large planar components. However, to facilitate rapid inspection, continuous sparse-view scanning is often employed, where the angular integration effect during exposure induces rotational blur in the projection domain. Furthermore, the data incompleteness inherent in sparse sampling manifests as sparse artifacts in the reconstructed image domain. To address these cross-domain degradations, this paper proposes RCL-Mamba, a measurement-oriented dual-domain State Space Model (SSM)-based image restoration network. The framework adopts a cascaded joint processing strategy: it first corrects the rotational blur in the projection domain and subsequently suppresses the sparse artifacts in the image domain. Additionally, we design a Mamba-CNN dual-branch module to adaptively balance large-scale blur correction with local detail recovery. Evaluations on both simulated datasets and real-world Printed Circuit Board (PCB) scans demonstrate that RCL-Mamba outperforms existing baselines in blur removal, artifact suppression, and structural preservation. Line-profile-based structural measurement further verifies that the proposed method better preserves via/pad boundaries and slender trace profiles. Crucially, by reducing the required scanning views from 512 to 64, our method enhances inspection efficiency by approximately 8-fold without compromising reconstruction quality, offering a robust measurement-oriented restoration solution for high-throughput RCL inspection with improved structural measurement fidelity.

Xuyang Duan, Genyuan Zhang, Zhenjiang Dong +4

Key Laboratory of Optoelectronic Technology and Systems, Ministry of Education, Chongqing University, Chongqing, 400044, China · Engineering Research Center of Industrial CT Nondestructive Testing, Ministry of Education, Chongqing University, Chongqing, 400044, China

Image DeblurringNon-Destructive TestingIndustrial InspectionImage RestorationState Space Models
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Jun 30, 2026

Patch-PODiff-ViT: Structured Latent Diffusion with Patchwise POD for Super-Resolution and Uncertainty Quantification

Diffusion models enable probabilistic super-resolution and conditional generation, but pixel-space methods are computationally expensive and learned latent spaces often lack interpretable uncertainty quantification. We introduce Patch-PODiff-ViT, a structured latent diffusion framework in which the latent space is defined by patchwise Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD), a fixed linear orthonormal basis over local patches, rather than learned by a nonlinear autoencoder. This yields low-dimensional, variance-ordered tokens that preserve spatial structure and enable efficient diffusion in a structured low-dimensional latent space with a Vision Transformer. Because the decoder is fixed, linear, and orthonormal, latent coefficient uncertainty can be propagated directly to physical-space predictive variance, enabling analytic propagation of predictive variance through the linear decoder without Monte Carlo estimation in pixel space. Across sea surface temperature, medical imaging, and natural images, the method achieves strong reconstruction with fewer parameters and lower memory, while producing well-calibrated spatial uncertainty that closely matches empirical ensembles.

Onkar Jadhav, Tim French, Matthew Rayson +1

School of Earth and Oceans, UWA Oceans Institute University of Western Australia Crawley, WA, Australia · School of Physics, Mathematics and Computing, Computer Science and Software Engineering University of Western Australia Crawley, WA, Australia

Diffusion Models for Image RestorationUncertainty QuantificationLatent Diffusion ModelsProper Orthogonal DecompositionImage Restoration
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Jun 29, 2026

CogSENet: Blind Image Deblurring with Blur-Conditioned Semantic Routing and Explicit Frequency Fusion

Blind image deblurring demands the recovery of high-fidelity details and coherent structures from complex, unknown degradations. Current blind image deblurring methods struggle with real-world, spatially varying degradations, and lack the semantic awareness necessary to reliably differentiate valid textures from artifacts. To bridge this gap, we propose CogSENet, a dynamic, semantic-aligned reconstruction framework inspired by the eagle's visual system. By mimicking the eagle's active saccadic scanning, we devise a Semantic-Driven State Space Module (SDSSM) with semantic-aware token regrouping via differentiable routing, enabling prompt-conditioned long-range dependency modeling. To ensure physically interpretable recovery of textures and structures, a BiFreqFusionBlock (BFFB) mirrors functional differentiation of the eagle's retina by decomposing features into high and low frequencies using wavelet transforms. Finally, we estimate a continuous Blur Field (CBF) from blur image and fuse it with CLIP semantic priors to modulate the deepest latent features, emulating focal adaptation and enabling adaptive restoration under spatially non-uniform blur. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CogSENetoutperforms state-of-the-art deblurring methods in both visual quality and structural fidelity with fewer parameters, while also performing favorably on dehazing, deraining, and denoising tasks.

Pan Wang, Yihao Hu, Xiujin Liu

University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China · Westlake University, Hangzhou, China · University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Image DeblurringImage RestorationGeometry-Guided Image Restoration
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Jun 29, 2026

Bricker to BRACE: A Bracket Exposure RAW Dataset and Restoration Model for Flicker-Banding

Flicker-banding (FB), arises from temporal aliasing between a camera's rolling shutter and a display's brightness modulation, degrading screen-captured image readability with color shifts and jagged patterns. Existing single-frame methods with simplified parametric stripe models cannot reliably distinguish these artifacts from genuine texture. To address this, we conduct a systematic analysis of complex FB morphologies and reveal their significant variation across exposure settings, motivating a multi-frame bracketed RAW restoration paradigm. We construct Bricker, a synthetic-real bracketed RAW dataset built via ray-tracing-based physical simulation and automated multi-exposure capture tool. We further propose BRACE: Bracketed RAW Flicker-Banding Removal, a multi-frame restoration model that utilizes frequency-aware banding prior and a multi-scale spatial cross-attention modulator (MSCAM) for cross-exposure spatial fusion. We also introduce the Stripe Frequency Consistency (SFC) metric to evaluate banding removal. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and real benchmarks. Our dataset and code are available at: https://github.com/ZZH-qwq/BRACE.

Zihan Zhou, Libo Zhu, Jue Gong +4

Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Image RestorationMulti-Exposure Image Fusion
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