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. PASDiff: Physics-Aware Semantic Guidance for Joint Real-World Low-Light Face Enhancement and Restoration

    Mar 26, 2026Yilin Ni, Wenjie Li, Zhengxue Wang +3Diffusion Model GuidanceLow-Light Image Enhancement

  2. PhySe-RPO: Physics and Semantics Guided Relative Policy Optimization for Diffusion-Based Surgical Smoke Removal

    Mar 24, 2026Zining Fang, Cheng Xue, Chunhui Liu +3Geometry-Guided Image RestorationImage Restoration

  3. It Takes Two: A Duet of Periodicity and Directionality for Burst Flicker Removal

    Mar 24, 2026Lishen Qu, Shihao Zhou, Jie Liang +3Image Restoration

  4. TimeWeaver: Age-Consistent Reference-Based Face Restoration with Identity Preservation

    Mar 24, 2026Teer Song, Yue Zhang, Yu Tian +6Image Restoration

  5. Tuning Real-World Image Restoration at Inference: A Test-Time Scaling Paradigm for Flow Matching Models

    Mar 23, 2026Purui Bai, Junxian Duan, Pin Wang +4Image RestorationDiffusion Models

  6. Dynamic Exposure Burst Image Restoration

    Mar 23, 2026Woohyeok Kim, Jaesung Rim, Daeyeon Kim +1Image RestorationComputational Imaging

  7. High-Quality and Efficient Turbulence Mitigation with Events

    Mar 21, 2026Xiaoran Zhang, Jian Ding, Yuxing Duan +4Atmospheric Turbulence MitigationImage Restoration

  8. Improving Image-to-Image Translation via a Rectified Flow Reformulation

    Mar 20, 2026Satoshi Iizuka, Shun Okamoto, Kazuhiro FukuiImage-to-Image TranslationRectified Flow

  9. FUMO: Prior-Modulated Diffusion for Single Image Reflection Removal

    Mar 19, 2026Telang Xu, Chaoyang Zhang, Guangtao Zhai +1Diffusion Models for Image RestorationSingle-Image Reflection Removal

  10. MeInTime: Bridging Age Gap in Identity-Preserving Face Restoration

    Mar 19, 2026Teer Song, Yue Zhang, Yu Tian +6Image RestorationDiffusion Models for Image Restoration

  11. Color image restoration based on nonlocal saturation-value similarity

    Mar 19, 2026Wei Wang, Yakun LiImage Restoration

  12. PaAgent: Portrait-Aware Image Restoration Agent via Subjective-Objective Reinforcement Learning

    Mar 17, 2026Yijian Wang, Qingsen Yan, Jiantao Zhou +2Agent-Based Image RestorationImage Restoration

  13. Face2Scene: Using Facial Degradation as an Oracle for Diffusion-Based Scene Restoration

    Mar 17, 2026Amirhossein Kazerouni, Maitreya Suin, Tristan Aumentado-Armstrong +6Image RestorationDiffusion Models for Image Restoration

  14. DriveFix: Spatio-Temporally Coherent Driving Scene Restoration

    Mar 17, 2026Heyu Si, Brandon James Denis, Muyang Sun +94D ReconstructionDynamic Novel View Synthesis

  15. Low-light Image Enhancement with Retinex Decomposition in Latent Space

    Mar 16, 2026Bolun Zheng, Qingshan Lei, Quan Chen +4Image EnhancementLow-Light Image Enhancement

  16. SpiralDiff: Spiral Diffusion with LoRA for RGB-to-RAW Conversion Across Cameras

    Mar 16, 2026Huanjing Yue, Shangbin Xie, Cong Cao +4Image-to-Image TranslationImage Restoration

  17. From Artefact to Insight: Efficient Low-Rank Adaptation of BrushNet for Scanning Probe Microscopy Image Restoration

    Mar 16, 2026Ziwei Wei, Yao Shen, Wanheng Lu +2Image RestorationDiffusion Models for Image Restoration

  18. M2IR: Proactive All-in-One Image Restoration via Mamba-style Modulation and Mixture-of-Experts

    Mar 16, 2026Shiwei Wang, Yongzhen Wang, Bingwen Hu +3Degradation-Aware Image RestorationAll-in-One Image Restoration

  19. Seeing Through the PRISM: Compound & Controllable Restoration of Scientific Images

    Mar 14, 2026Rupa Kurinchi-Vendhan, Pratyusha Sharma, Antonio Torralba +1Image RestorationAll-in-One Image Restoration

  20. V-Bridge: Bridging Video Generative Priors to Versatile Few-shot Image Restoration

    Mar 13, 2026Shenghe Zheng, Junpeng Jiang, Wenbo LiImage RestorationAll-in-One Image Restoration

  21. Empowering Semantic-Sensitive Underwater Image Enhancement with VLM

    Mar 13, 2026Guodong Fan, Shengning Zhou, Genji Yuan +3Geometry-Guided Image RestorationImage Enhancement

  22. DINOLight: Robust Ambient Light Normalization with Self-supervised Visual Prior Integration

    Mar 13, 2026Youngjin Oh, Junhyeong Kwon, Nam Ik ChoImage RestorationImage Enhancement

  23. RAW-Domain Degradation Models for Realistic Smartphone Super-Resolution

    Mar 12, 2026Ali Mosleh, Faraz Ali, Fengjia Zhang +4Image Super-ResolutionImage Restoration

  24. Towards Universal Computational Aberration Correction in Photographic Cameras: A Comprehensive Benchmark Analysis

    Mar 12, 2026Xiaolong Qian, Qi Jiang, Yao Gao +5Computational ImagingImage Restoration

  25. Frames2Residual: Spatiotemporal Decoupling for Self-Supervised Video Denoising

    Mar 11, 2026Mingjie Ji, Zhan Shi, Kailai Zhou +2Self-Supervised LearningImage Restoration

  26. Decoder-Free Distillation for Quantized Image Restoration

    Mar 10, 2026S. M. A. Sharif, Abdur Rehman, Seongwan Kim +1Image RestorationQuantization-Aware Distillation

  27. QualiTeacher: Quality-Conditioned Pseudo-Labeling for Real-World Image Restoration

    Mar 9, 2026Fengyang Xiao, Jingjia Feng, Peng Hu +6Image Restoration