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.

Latest papers

CardsList

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

  1. HDRFace: Rethinking Face Restoration with High-Dimensional Representation

    May 14, 2026Zirui Wang, Xianhui Lin, Yi Dong +7Diffusion Models for Image RestorationDiffusion Model Guidance

  2. Aligning Network Equivariance with Data Symmetry: A Theoretical Framework and Adaptive Approach for Image Restoration

    May 13, 2026Feiyu Tan, Qi Xie, Zongben Xu +1Equivariant Neural NetworksImage Restoration

  3. HADAR-Based Thermal Infrared Hyperspectral Image Restoration

    May 13, 2026Cheng Dai, Jiale Lin, Bingxuan Song +4Thermal ImagingPhysics-Guided Image Restoration

  4. Unifying Physically-Informed Weather Priors in A Single Model for Image Restoration Across Multiple Adverse Weather Conditions

    May 13, 2026Jiaqi Xu, Xiaowei Hu, Lei Zhu +1Physics-Guided Image RestorationAll-in-One Image Restoration

  5. Beyond MMSE: Enhancing PnP Restoration with ProxiMAP

    May 12, 2026Kenta Vert, Giacomo Meanti, Scott Pesme +2Diffusion Models for Image RestorationComputational Imaging

  6. UniFixer: A Universal Reference-Guided Fixer for Diffusion-Based View Synthesis

    May 12, 2026Sihan Chen, Xiang Zhang, Yang Zhang +2Diffusion Models for Image RestorationNovel View Synthesis

  7. Improving Diffusion Posterior Samplers with Lagged Temporal Corrections for Image Restoration

    May 12, 2026Davide Evangelista, Elena Morotti, Francesco Pivi +1Diffusion SamplingImage Restoration

  8. LiBrA-Net: Lie-Algebraic Bilateral Affine Fields for Real-Time 4K Video Dehazing

    May 12, 2026Yongcong Wang, Chengchao Shen, Guangwei Gao +5Image RestorationImage Dehazing

  9. Leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models for All-in-One Image Restoration via a Mixture of Frequency Experts

    May 12, 2026Eunho Lee, Rei Kawakami, Youngbae HwangMixture of ExpertsAll-in-One Image Restoration

  10. ZeroIDIR: Zero-Reference Illumination Degradation Image Restoration with Perturbed Consistency Diffusion Models

    May 12, 2026Hai Jiang, Zhen Liu, Yinjie Lei +3Low-Light Image EnhancementImage Restoration

  11. Halo Separation-guided Underwater Multi-scale Image Restoration

    May 11, 2026Jiaxin Yang, Honglin Liu, Yongli Wang +3Underwater Image EnhancementUnderwater Imaging

  12. Cross-Domain Lossy Compression via Constrained Minimum Entropy Coupling

    May 11, 2026Nam Nguyen, Hassan Tavakoli, An Vuong +2Learned Image CompressionRate-Distortion Optimization

  13. FlowADMM: Plug-and-play ADMM with Flow-based Renoise-Denoise Priors

    May 9, 2026Hendrik Sommerhoff, Michael MoellerAlternating Direction Method of MultipliersImage Restoration

  14. DRNet: All-in-One Image Restoration via Prior-Guided Dynamic Reparameterization

    May 9, 2026Ao Li, Xiaoning Liu, Sheng Li +5All-in-One Image RestorationImage Restoration

  15. MicroDiffuse3D: A Foundation Model for 3D Microscopy Imaging Restoration

    May 8, 2026Yongkang Li, Brian Wong, King Wai Chiu +5Image RestorationMicroscopy Image Analysis

  16. UIESNN: A Scale-Aware Spiking Network for Underwater Image Enhancement

    May 8, 2026Shuang Chen, Ruochen Li, Zihan Zhu +3Underwater Image EnhancementSpiking Neural Networks

  17. Breaking Spatial Uniformity: Prior-Guided Mamba with Radial Serialization for Lens Flare Removal

    May 8, 2026Zijia Fu, Yuanfei Huang, Lizhi Wang +1MambaImage Restoration

  18. Continuous Expert Assembly: Instance-Conditioned Low-Rank Residuals for All-in-One Image Restoration

    May 7, 2026Haisen He, Xiangyu Zou, SongLin Dong +3Low-Rank AdaptationAll-in-One Image Restoration

  19. A unified Benchmark for Multi-Frame Image Restoration under Severe Refractive Warping

    May 6, 2026Maxim V. Shugaev, Md Reshad Ul Hoque, Bridget Kennedy +8Image RestorationVideo Restoration

  20. Conditions for well-posed color recovery in scattering media

    May 5, 2026Grigory Solomatov, Derya AkkaynakImage RestorationInverse Problems

  21. deSEO: Physics-Aware Dataset Creation for High-Resolution Satellite Image Shadow Removal

    May 5, 2026Lorenzo Beltrame, Jules Salzinger, Filip Svoboda +4Remote Sensing Image UnderstandingShadow Removal

  22. IConFace: Identity-Structure Asymmetric Conditioning for Unified Reference-Aware Face Restoration

    May 4, 2026Axi Niu, Jinyang Zhang, Senyan QingImage Restoration

  23. Edge-Efficient Image Restoration: Transformer Distillation into State-Space Models

    May 4, 2026Srinivas Soumitri Miriyala, Sowmya Vajrala, Sravanth Kodavanti +2Image DerainingImage Enhancement

  24. Degradation-Aware Adaptive Context Gating for Unified Image Restoration

    May 2, 2026Lei He, Jielei Chu, Fengmao Lv +4All-in-One Image RestorationImage Restoration

  25. Unpaired Image Deraining Using Reward-Guided Self-Reinforcement Strategy

    May 1, 2026Yinghao Chen, Yeying Jin, Xiang Chen +3Unsupervised Image RestorationSelf-Training

  26. Faithful Extreme Image Rescaling with Learnable Reversible Transformation and Semantic Priors

    May 1, 2026Hao Wei, Yanhui Zhou, Chenyang Ge +2Diffusion Models for Image RestorationImage Restoration