Query-Specific Degradation-Aware Representation

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3 papers in the last four weeks, down 40% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Jul 6Week of Sep 21

Latest papers 24

Sep 23, 2026cs.CV

Diff-RF: Mutually Reinforced Image Registration and Fusion via Degradation-Aware Learning

Image registration and fusion aim to establish spatial correspondences from misaligned multi-modal source images, and integrate complementary information. However, in real-world imaging scenarios, source images are often affected by complex and diverse degradations, such as low illumination, noise, etc., which severely hinder the effectiveness of registration and fusion. To address this issue, we propose a mutually reinforced image registration and fusion diffusion framework via degradation-aware learning, termed Diff-RF. It explores the intrinsic coupling between registration-fusion and information restoration in the degradation conditions, enabling high-quality fusion of unregistered images under complex degradation conditions. First, the intra-modal restoration module is designed to alleviate modality-specific degradations by leveraging information within each modality, thereby providing more reliable structural representations for registration and facilitating subsequent cross-modal fusion. Second, we develop a cross-modal diffusion registration and fusion module that establishes bidirectional interaction between registration and fusion. By integrating fusion-derived visual cues and correspondence-based geometric conditions into the diffusion process, the proposed framework progressively refines spatial alignment and exploits cross-modal complementary information to achieve collaborative enhancement. Rather than treating them as independent components, degradation-aware information restoration and the collaborative optimization of registration and fusion are tightly coupled, achieving overall performance improvements. Extensive experiments on multiple extended datasets demonstrate that Diff-RF achieves superior registration accuracy and fusion quality under various degraded scenarios, exhibiting strong robustness and generalization ability.
Sep 23, 2026cs.CV

Breaking Weather-Content Coupling: Type-Severity Guided Progressive Disentanglement for All-in-One Infrared Restoration

Infrared (IR) imaging is crucial for autonomous driving, remote sensing, and other perception tasks. However, adverse weather may introduce fake structural responses that are entangled with real thermal structures. Existing IR restoration methods are typically designed for a single degradation type or directly reconstruct from degradation-entangled representations. Consequently, they struggle to distinguish intrinsic thermal structures from weather-induced fake responses and to accommodate spatially varying degradation severity, leading to artifacts or the over-suppression of weak but meaningful thermal responses. To address these issues, we propose TSGPD-IR, a type-severity guided progressive disentanglement network for all-in-one infrared restoration that factorizes restoration guidance into task-level weather semantics and region-level degradation severity. Specifically, a Weather and Semantic Co-Guided Multi-Level Prompt Generation Module combines global weather semantics with stage-wise local features to generate adaptive prompts that progressively suppress degradation-induced responses while preserving intrinsic thermal structures. To complement global weather semantics with spatial restoration control, a Proxy-Supervised Regional Degradation Estimator derives severity supervision without manual annotations and predicts spatially varying degradation priors. Guided by these cues, a Multi-Source Collaborative Expert Selection Strategy uses a shared branch to preserve weather-invariant thermal structures and hierarchical routing to select weather-specific expert pools and severity-compatible regional experts. This design progressively separates degradation interference from genuine thermal content and enables region-adaptive restoration, reducing both residual artifacts and over-suppression.
Sep 1, 2026cs.CV

IT-TextFusion: Iterative Text-Image Interaction with Text-Guided Residual Refinement for Degradation-Aware Image Fusion

Text-guided image fusion has recently emerged as an effective paradigm for integrating multi-modal information while enabling flexible and task-oriented fusion control. However, existing text-guided fusion methods often rely on shallow semantic-visual interaction and limited attention mechanisms, which restrict their ability to robustly handle complex degradations and fully exploit textual guidance. In this paper, we propose an iterative text-guided image fusion framework that incorporates text-conditioned feature interaction across multiple fusion and refinement stages. The proposed method integrates deepest-level Cross-Attention, multi-scale Cross-Gate Fusion, and stage-specific text-conditioned modulation, allowing the global text embedding to condition hierarchical feature fusion and residual refinement. By repeatedly injecting the pooled text embedding across hierarchical decoder and refinement stages, the proposed framework provides degradation-aware global semantic conditioning while preserving complementary information from the visible and infrared modalities. Experiments on several benchmark datasets show that the proposed method improves several information-preservation and perceptual-quality metrics, while exhibiting metric-dependent trade-offs on some datasets.
Aug 10, 2026cs.AI

CoRe-UIE: Rethinking Coexisting and Region-wise Degradation for Underwater Image Enhancement

Underwater images often suffer from diverse and coexisting degradations, including color distortion, scattering haze, texture attenuation, and uneven illumination. These degradations vary across regions and may coexist locally, making conventional uniform restoration difficult to adapt to different degradation patterns. To address this problem, we propose Coexisting and Region-wise Degradation for Underwater Image Enhancement (\textbf{CoRe-UIE}), a degradation-oriented expert collaboration framework. CoRe-UIE combines a content-preserving shared expert with four shared-backbone routed experts for color correction, scattering suppression, texture recovery, and illumination protection. The routed experts share the same architecture but have independent parameters, and are assigned to different regions through input-derived degradation cues and region-adaptive Top-kk routing. We further introduce a Hilbert--Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC)-based representation constraint to reduce statistical dependence among expert features and alleviate redundant expert responses. Experiments on UIEB, LSUI, and U45 demonstrate that CoRe-UIE achieves competitive quantitative performance and visually balanced enhancement under diverse underwater degradation conditions.
Aug 7, 2026cs.CV

Degradation-Aware Prompt Learning with Cross-Modal Compensation for Adverse Weather Removal

Adverse weather causes diverse and complex image degradations, severely compromising the reliability of computer vision systems. Existing all-in-one restoration models attempt to address multiple degradation types within a unified framework, but often lack explicit spatial and semantic modeling of degradation characteristics, limiting their adaptability to diverse weather conditions. To address this limitation, we propose a Degradation-Aware Cross-Modal Prompt Compensation Network (DCMPC-Net) that leverages cross-modal degradation cues from a pretrained vision-language model to condition restoration features within a unified backbone. Specifically, our DCMPC-Net mainly consists of the Cross-Modal Prompt Generator (CMPG), Prompt-Guided Attention Alignment Module (PGAAM), and Dual Feature Compensation Module (DFCM). The CMPG integrates textual embeddings with visual features to produce degradation-aware prompts that encode degradation-related semantic and contextual cues. These prompts are injected into the decoder via a PGAAM, which adaptively aligns semantic information with degraded regions to facilitate context-aware restoration. To further enhance structural fidelity, DFCM is introduced that disentangles degradation artifacts from scene structures, thereby improving the reconstruction of fine textures and detailed content. By integrating cross-modal semantic guidance with spatial alignment and structural enhancement, DCMPC-Net achieves robust and perceptually consistent restoration across diverse weather conditions. Extensive experiments show that DCMPC-Net outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both task-specific and unified settings, achieving superior accuracy and visual fidelity.
Aug 4, 2026cs.CV

Compass: Degradation-Simulated Reciprocal Learning with Lightweight Needle RWKV for Multimodal Crack Segmentation under Missing Modalities

In multimodal crack segmentation for industrial facilities, the key challenge is preventing missing modalities from degrading pixel-level performance while maintaining low computational cost. Existing methods struggle to address semantic degradation caused by missing modalities. We propose Compass, a lightweight network for robust crack segmentation under arbitrary missing modalities. Compass comprises Degradation Simulation Distillation (DSD), Needle Block, and Evidential Topology-Preserving Fusion (ETPF). DSD constructs a degradation simulation stream that mimics more severe missing conditions and performs reciprocal distillation with the original stream, decoupling complete perception from degradation adaptation. Within DSD, Feature-Aware Prototype Transmitter (FAPT) performs modality agnostic prototype-guided feature completion to maintain semantic integrity under incomplete modality conditions. As a lightweight backbone, Needle injects crack-direction cues into WKV modulation and combines connectivity-aware gating with anisotropic context probing for structure-aware modeling. ETPF fuses multimodal features via Dempster-Shafer evidential combination with uncertainty-gated decoding, preserving crack topology while suppressing unreliable features. Experiments on three datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance under diverse missing modality scenarios. Even with 90% depth modality missing on CrackDepth, Compass achieves F1 of 0.8216 and mIoU of 0.8434 with only 2.58M parameters. The code is available at https://github.com/Karl1109/Compass.
Aug 3, 2026cs.CV

Loop-Mamba: A Loop Mamba with Degradation-Aware and Shared Memory for Old Photo Restoration

Old photographs often suffer from multiple coupled degradations, including scratches, cracks, fading, blur, noise, and missing regions, severely degrading both visual quality and semantic content. We propose Loop-Mamba, a lightweight loop-based state-space framework that formulates old photo restoration as progressive state evolution, where a persis- tent restoration state is continuously propagated and refined through iterative computation. Specifically, we introduce a Semantic-Guided Degradation Estimator (SGDE) to explicitly model heterogeneous degradations by jointly predicting local degradation maps and global degradation scores, providing degradation-aware guidance for state evolution. We further develop a Shared Structural Memory Mamba (S2^2M- Mamba), which maintains a persistent restoration state across iterations, enabling persistent state evolution through shared structural memory for robust long-range structural reconstruction. Benefiting from first-order state recursion, Loop-Mamba propagates latent restoration states through recurrent tran- sitions instead of repeatedly stacking deep feature transformations, thereby alleviating gradient dilution while avoiding the computational overhead inherent in iterative CNN- and Transformer-based restoration frameworks. A lightweight multi-directional scanning strategy further enhances direc- tional information aggregation and preserves structural continuity. To better evaluate restoration quality, we introduce the task-oriented Old Photo Damage Recovery Score (ODRS), which jointly measures degradation recovery and structural reconstruction fidelity. Experimental results on the public SynOld benchmark demonstrate that Loop-Mamba consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods across both conventional restoration metrics and the proposed ODRS.
Aug 3, 2026cs.CV

SpikeRestormer: Towards Energy-Efficient All-in-One Image Restoration via Unified Event Reasoning

ANN-based All-in-One image restoration (AiOIR) unifies diverse degradation handling but incurs high computational costs, limiting its real-time deployment. While Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer a low-power alternative, applying them to static images remains challenging. This difficulty arises because explicit event signals are absent, and degradation cues are heavily entangled with scene structures, hindering the learning of reliable restoration-oriented spike events. To address these issues, we propose SpikeRestormer, an energy-efficient SNN for AiOIR that performs event reasoning over internally generated spike cues. Specifically, we propose a degradation-event perception process to extract spike-based degradation events through Subtractive Degradation Event Attention (SDEA). Moreover, we introduce Hierarchical Bayesian Skip Masking (HBSM) and Additive Restoration Event Attention (AREA) processes for event-reliability inference and restoration-event construction, respectively. By integrating these complementary processes, SpikeRestormer formulates restoration as a unified process of degradation-event perception, degradation-event reliability inference, and restoration-event construction, liberating the potential of SNNs for energy-efficient AiOIR. Extensive experiments show that SpikeRestormer delivers competitive performance against ANN-based methods and establishes new state-of-the-art results among SNN-based methods with significantly lower energy consumption.
Aug 1, 2026cs.CV

Unleashing the Power of Text: Text-Guided Flow Matching for Image Fusion under Complex Degradations

Infrared-visible image fusion under realistic degradation scenarios is a challenging task, as degradations not only cause a loss of reliable modality-specific information in observed images but also hinder the fusion process. Recent studies indicate that text can provide prior information about degradation characteristics, complementing the limited evidence available from corrupted input images and facilitating fusion. However, existing methods typically inject fixed global text representations into visual features, making it difficult for textual guidance to adapt to spatially varying degradations, local structures, and thermal saliency. To this end, we propose TGFusion, a text-guided latent-space flow matching framework that unifies degradation suppression and cross-modal fusion. TGFusion encodes task, degradation, and generation cues into structured prompts. To fully exploit these priors, we design a Prompt-conditioned Multi-stream Joint Flow Transformer that represents text as an independent semantic stream alongside fusion, visible, and infrared streams. Joint attention enables token-level bidirectional interaction and layer-wise updating among semantic and visual representations, allowing degradation semantics to dynamically guide reliable information selection and fusion latent generation. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks and complex degradation scenarios demonstrate that TGFusion achieves superior or competitive performance in perceptual quality, image naturalness, structural-detail preservation, and infrared-saliency retention, while remaining robust across diverse single and compound degradations.
Jul 23, 2026cs.CV

DART: A Degradation-Aware Recurrent Transformer for Archival Film Restoration

Archival film restoration is a challenging problem because historical footage contains compound degradations such as scratches, dust, blur, noise, flicker, and photometric aging, while clean reference videos are unavailable. Existing video restoration methods largely treat these degradations implicitly, reconstructing frames without explicit knowledge of where damage occurs or how severe it is. We propose DART, a degradation-aware recurrent transformer for archival film restoration. DART predicts and propagates a soft defect mask through time, using it to guide temporal fusion and condition the restoration network on both damage location and severity. This makes the restoration process explicitly aware of film artifacts rather than relying only on reconstruction losses. Experiments on real archival benchmarks show that DART improves no-reference perceptual quality over prior restoration architectures while remaining compact and efficient, producing cleaner and more temporally consistent restorations of structured film damage.
Jul 18, 2026cs.CV

DARA: Degradation-Aware Low-Rank Residual Adaptation with Original-to-Corrupted Distillation for Corruption-Robust Animal Re-Identification

Animal re-identification (Re-ID) relies on fine-grained identity cues that can be disrupted by blur, noise, compression, and other visual degradations. Existing robustness strategies based on degradation-augmented training or pixel-level restoration improve robustness indirectly, but do not explicitly repair shifts in the identity retrieval space. We study corruption-robust animal Re-ID as input-conditioned feature-space repair and introduce DARA, a lightweight retrofit for compact Re-ID models. DARA freezes the fine-tuned backbone and learns routed low-rank residual experts to adapt degraded-input embeddings without corruption-type annotations. To stabilize this adaptive repair, original-to-corrupted distillation uses an original-image teacher to preserve individual embeddings and retrieval relations. Experiments on ATRW, FriesianCattle2017, MPDD, and SeaStarReID2023 show that DARA improves corrupted-query retrieval over standard and augmentation-based fine-tuning, generalizes to unseen corruptions and cross-domain evaluation, and recovers 77.0% of the corrupted-query mAP gap to full corrupted fine-tuning while adding only 0.49% parameters and 0.05% FLOPs.
Jul 16, 2026cs.CV

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.
Jun 29, 2026cs.CV

PGE-SAM: Prompt-Guided Feature Enhancement for Interactive Segmentation under Degradation

Segment Anything Model (SAM) has revolutionized promptable image segmentation with strong zero-shot generalization. However, its performance degrades substantially under real-world imaging artifacts such as noise, blur, and compression. Existing methods restore features globally without focusing on segmentation-relevant regions and neglect SAM's iterative refinement mechanism, leading to suboptimal performance in interactive settings. We propose Prompt-Guided Feature Enhancement SAM (PGE-SAM), a framework that explicitly leverages user prompts and prior mask predictions to spatially guide the feature restoration process toward regions of interest through a Prompt Guidance Generator. To recover fine-grained details lost under degradation, we introduce Multi-Scale Features Interaction to incorporate low-level encoder features, along with a Foreground Reconstruction Loss that restricts feature-level supervision to the segmentation target. Furthermore, we present DM-Seg, a benchmark for interactive segmentation on degraded medical images, spanning multiple imaging modalities with both general and modality-specific degradations at varying severity levels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PGE-SAM achieves SOTA robustness on both medical and natural image domains across multiple degradation levels, while maintaining generalization to clean images and adding less than one-fifth of the parameters of prior methods.
Jun 28, 2026cs.CV

Spatially Localized Image Degradation Embeddings for Image Quality Assessment

Self-supervised learning (SSL) currently drives state-of-the-art performance in no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA). However, standard SSL pipelines uniformly apply synthetic distortions across the entire image field, which can limit their sensitivity to spatially localized and co-occurring degradations encountered in real-world content. In this work, we empirically expose this representational blind spot across existing state-of-the-art encoders, demonstrating their reduced sensitivity to spatially bounded image degradations. To bridge this gap, we introduce Spatial Localized Image Degradation Embeddings for Image Quality Assessment (SLIDE-IQA). SLIDE-IQA employs a dual-branch Vision Transformer framework that injects spatially bounded degradations into a contrastive pretraining objective. To handle the spatial complexity of these degradations, we introduce a Threshold-Bounded Exclusion Mechanism, a representational design choice that resolves structural conflicts arising from spatially localized distortions to ensure the latent space respects both degradation type and spatial scale. Finally, we show that SLIDE-IQA's synthetic-only pretraining significantly improves sensitivity to localized distortions, while achieving competitive performance on NR-IQA benchmarks against existing SSL NR-IQA models.
Jun 26, 2026cs.CV

BiDeMem: Bidirectional Degradation Memory for Explainable Image Restoration

Degradation-aware prompts, conditions, and latent priors are increasingly used in image restoration, yet they are usually judged by a single endpoint: whether the restored image obtains higher PSNR. This is a weak test of semantics. A condition can help by adding capacity, acting as a global correction bias, or exploiting dataset shortcuts, without becoming an interpretable degradation prior. We propose BiDeMem, a bidirectional degradation memory for explainable image restoration. A query built from restoration features and input statistics retrieves a compact top-k subset of memory slots. The same selected slot identity supports the restoration path at inference time and a training-only forward-degradation explanation path. The study centers on verifiability in a controlled multi-degradation NAFNet setting. New controls separate the gain from a correction head alone, a dense query prior, and a static global prior: these variants are 0.2588, 0.2586, and 0.2839 dB below BiRank, respectively. Strong residual supervision and a wider degradation head also remain below the full bidirectional memory model. Intervention probes show that BiRank preserves restoration quality while increasing wrong-prior and native-prior sensitivity, framing degradation memory as both a restoration module and a falsifiable explanation mechanism.
Jun 25, 2026cs.CV

Multi-modality Image Fusion under Adverse Weather: Mask-Guided Feature Restoration and Interaction

Multi-modality image fusion (MMIF) enhances scene representation by exploiting complementary cues from different modalities. Adverse weather, however, causes significant image degradation, disrupting feature representation and requiring simultaneous feature restoration and cross-modal complementarity. Existing methods often struggle with effective representation learning under such conditions, limiting their practical performance. To address these challenges, we propose a mask-guided MMIF method that integrates feature restoration and interaction. We first introduce "Pseudo Ground Truth" to simplify training, promoting faster and more effective feature learning. Then, we design a mask generation mechanism based on the mapping relationship between the fused result and the source images, quantifying the relative contribution of each modality during the fusion process. By incorporating the proposed mask-guided cross-modal cross-attention mechanism, the network is encouraged to selectively attend to informative features during modality interaction, mitigating the risk of overfitting to the static distribution of the "Pseudo Ground Truth". Additionally, we propose a mask-guided learning strategy and a task-coupled degradation-aware learning strategy to balance feature restoration and interaction. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method surpasses state-of-the-art approaches in visual quality, quantitative metrics, and downstream tasks. The source code is available at https://github.com/ixilai/AMG-Fuse.
Jun 15, 2026cs.CV

DDTNet: Degradation Disentanglement and Transfer Network for Test-Time All-in-One De-weathering Adaptation

All-in-one adverse weather image restoration aims to remove multiple degradations, such as rain, haze, and snow, using a single unified model. Despite their broad applicability, existing methods typically compromise performance, delivering balanced but suboptimal results for individual degradation types. This issue becomes more pronounced when a domain gap exists between training and testing data. Motivated by the observation that modeling degradation patterns is more feasible than recovering clean content, we propose the Degradation Disentanglement and Transfer Network (DDTNet), which focuses specifically on degradation transfer. By disentangling degradation patterns from target-domain degraded images and transferring them to source domain clean images, DDTNet generates domain-adaptive paired training data. These pairs are then used to fine-tune restoration models, significantly enhancing their adaptability across diverse weather conditions and domains. The core of DDTNet is the Degradation Disentanglement Module (DDM), which comprises Degradation Coupled Attention (DCA) to capture both general and weather-specific features, thereby enabling effective disentanglement and transfer of degradation patterns. Experimental results demonstrate that DDTNet significantly and consistently improves existing all-in-one models across real-world deraining, desnowing, and dehazing datasets.
May 21, 2026cs.CV

SpaceDG: Benchmarking Spatial Intelligence under Visual Degradation

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made rapid progress in spatial intelligence, yet existing spatial reasoning benchmarks largely assume pristine visual inputs and overlook the degradations that commonly occur in real-world deployment, such as motion blur, low light, adverse weather, lens distortion, and compression artifacts. This raises a fundamental question: how robust is the spatial intelligence of current MLLMs when visual observations are imperfect? To answer this question, we introduce SpaceDG, the first large-scale dataset for degradation-aware spatial understanding. It is constructed with a physically grounded degradation synthesis engine that embeds degradation formation process into 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) rendering, enabling realistic simulation of nine degradation types. The resulting dataset contains approximately 1M QA pairs from nearly 1,000 indoor scenes. We further introduce SpaceDG-Bench, an human-verified benchmark with 1,102 questions spanning 11 reasoning categories and 9 visual degradation types, yielding over 10K VQA instances. Evaluating 25 open- and closed-source MLLMs reveals that visual degradations consistently and substantially impair spatial reasoning, exposing a critical robustness gap. Finally, we show that finetuning on SpaceDG markedly improves degradation robustness and can even surpass human performance under degraded conditions without any performance drop on clean images, highlighting the promise of degradation-aware training for robust spatial intelligence.
May 12, 2026cs.CV

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

All-in-one image restoration seeks to recover clean images from inputs affected by diverse and unknown degradations using a unified framework. Recent methods have shown strong performance by identifying degradation characteristics to guide the restoration process. However, many of them treat degradations as discrete categories, which limits their ability to model the continuous relational structure that arises in composite degradations. To address this issue, we propose a multimodal large language model (MLLM)-guided image restoration framework that exploits multimodal embeddings as guidance for low-level restoration. Specifically, MLLM-derived features are injected into an encoder-decoder architecture through an MLLM-guided fusion block (MGFB) to enhance degradation-aware representations. In addition, we incorporate a mixture-of-frequency-experts (MoFE) module that adaptively combines frequency experts using MLLM-guided contextual cues. To further improve expert routing, we design an MLLM-guided router with a relational alignment loss that encourages routing patterns consistent with the embedding-space relationships of degraded inputs. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that the proposed method achieves strong performance across diverse restoration settings and establishes a new state of the art on the challenging CDD11 dataset, outperforming previous methods by up to 1.35 dB.
May 10, 2026cs.CV

DegBins: Degradation-Driven Binning for Depth Super-Resolution

Depth super-resolution (DSR) aims to recover a high-resolution (HR) depth map from its low-resolution (LR) counterpart. With color image guidance, this task is typically formulated as learning the residual between HR and LR in a low-dimensional feature space. However, this additive formulation is insufficient to accurately capture the complex relationship between HR and LR, especially under spatially varying degradations. In this paper, we introduce DegBins, a novel DSR framework that leverages degradation-driven binning to adaptively enhance residual modeling. Specifically, DegBins reformulates the regression-based DSR as a hybrid classification-regression problem, where the residual depth is represented as a linear combination of discrete depth bins weighted by their learned probability distribution, yielding more flexible and expressive representations. Furthermore, DegBins models the degradation relationship between HR and LR in a high-dimensional feature space, enabling adaptive bin range adjustment and probability optimization conditioned on local degradation characteristics. To progressively improve reconstruction quality, DegBins adopts a multi-stage refinement scheme, where each stage performs finer-grained bin partitioning and probability updating based on the former estimation. This coarse-to-fine design facilitates more accurate depth recovery, particularly in regions with severe degradations or complex structural variations. Extensive experiments across five benchmarks demonstrate that DegBins consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy, robustness, and generalization.
May 2, 2026cs.CV

Degradation-Aware Adaptive Context Gating for Unified Image Restoration

Unified image restoration using a single model often faces task interference due to diverse degradations. To address this, we propose DACG-IR (Degradation-Aware Adaptive Context Gating), which enables explicit perception of degradation characteristics to dynamically modulate feature representations. Our method constructs degradation-aware contextual representations from the input to modulate attention distribution, frequency-domain features, and feature aggregation. Specifically, a lightweight multi-scale degradation-aware module extracts coarse degradation information and generates layer-wise prompts. These prompts guide attention temperature and output gating in encoder and decoder blocks for adaptive feature extraction. Additionally, a spatial-channel dual-gated adaptive fusion mechanism refines encoder features, suppressing noise propagation from shallow to deep layers. This design effectively suppresses degradation-induced noise while preserving informative structures. Experiments show DACG-IR outperforms state-of-the-art methods in single-task, all-in-one, adverse weather removal, and composite degradation settings. Code: https://github.com/HlHomes/DACG-IR-code
Apr 24, 2026cs.CV

Breaking Degradation Coupling: A Structural Entropy Guided Decoupled Framework and Benchmark for Infrared Enhancement

Thermal infrared image enhancement aims to restore high-quality images from complex compound degradations. Existing all-in-one approaches typically employ a single shared backbone to handle diverse degradations, which causes gradient interference and parameter competition. To address this, we propose a Structural Entropy-Guided Decoupled (SEGD) Framework. Unlike unified modeling paradigms, SEGD decomposes compound degradations into independent sub-processes and models them in a divide-and-conquer manner through Degradation-Specific Residual Modules (DRMs). Each DRM focuses on residual estimation for a specific degradation, enabling task decoupling while remaining jointly trainable, which mitigates parameter contention. A Degradation-Aware Evidential Network further estimates degradation type and intensity, providing priors that adaptively regulate DRM restoration strength. To handle compound cases, DRMs are composed in varying orders to form multiple restoration paths, from which the most informative features are aggregated under a structural-entropy criterion, yielding decoder-ready representations with structural fidelity and degradation awareness. Integrating divide-and-conquer restoration, evidential perception, and entropy-guided adaptation, SEGD achieves fine-grained and interpretable enhancement. We also construct a nighttime TIR benchmark for evaluation under real low-light conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that SEGD surpasses state-of-the-art methods while achieving higher efficiency with fewer parameters.
Apr 23, 2026cs.CV

Causal Disentanglement-Inspired Degradation Representation Learning for Full-Reference Image Quality Assessment

Existing deep network-based full-reference image quality assessment (FR-IQA) models typically work by performing pairwise comparisons of deep features from the reference and distorted images. In this paper, we approach this problem from a different perspective and propose a novel FR-IQA paradigm based on causal inference and decoupled representation learning. Unlike typical feature comparison-based FR-IQA models, our approach formulates degradation estimation as a causal disentanglement process guided by intervention on latent representations. We first decouple degradation and content representations by exploiting the content invariance between the reference and distorted images. Second, inspired by the human visual masking effect, we design a masking module to model the causal relationship between image content and degradation features, thereby extracting content-influenced degradation features from distorted images. Finally, quality scores are predicted from these degradation features using either supervised regression or label-free dimensionality reduction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves highly competitive performance on standard IQA benchmarks across fully supervised, few-label, and label-free settings. Furthermore, we evaluate the approach on diverse non-standard natural image domains with scarce data, including underwater, radiographic, medical, neutron, and screen-content images. Benefiting from its ability to perform scenario-specific training and prediction without labeled IQA data, our method exhibits superior cross-domain generalization compared to existing training-free FR-IQA models.
Nov 20, 2025cs.CV

Blind Quality Enhancement of Compressed Video via Fine-Grained Degradation-Guided Sequential Inference

Existing studies on quality enhancement for compressed video (QECV) predominantly rely on known quantization parameters (QPs), training separate enhancement models for each QP setting, which are referred to as non-blind methods. However, in practical scenarios such as transcoding and transmission, QPs may be partially or entirely unavailable, which limits the applicability of these methods and motivates the development of blind QECV techniques. Existing blind methods typically generate degradation vectors using classification models trained with cross-entropy loss, and employ them as channel attention to guide artifact reduction. Nevertheless, such degradation representations mainly capture global compression information and lack fine-grained spatial cues, making them less effective in handling spatially varying artifact patterns. To address this issue, we propose a pre-trained degradation representation learning module that decouples and extracts high-dimensional, multi-scale degradation representations from compressed video content, providing fine-grained guidance for artifact reduction. Furthermore, most existing blind and nonblind methods adopt a uniform inference architecture for all compression levels, ignoring the distinct computational demands of different QPs. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a sequential inference strategy that adaptively adjusts the number of artifact reduction stages according to the estimated compression level. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method significantly improves enhancement performance. In particular, at QP = 22, it raises PSNR improvement from 0.31 dB to 0.65 dB over the previous state-of-the-art blind method. Meanwhile, with the proposed sequential inference strategy, the average inference time at QP = 22 is reduced by 50% compared with that at QP = 42.