Polarization imaging captures distinctive surface and geometric cues that benefit a wide range of vision tasks. However, real-world polarization acquisition is often affected by multiple coupled degradations, making image restoration essential for practical polarization vision. Existing methods are largely tailored to specific degradations and remain constrained by the limited scale and quality of polarization data. To address these limitations, we develop an all-in-one polarization restoration framework for diverse and composite degradations. We first study the impact of different polarization representations on restoration performance and identify the normalized Stokes representation as an effective choice for separating intensity and polarization information. Accordingly, we devise a dual-branch architecture that separates intensity and polarization modeling. To overcome the limitations of polarization-specific training, the intensity branch leverages pretrained general restoration priors and a mixture-of-experts extension for composite degradations, while its restoration knowledge is adaptively distilled into the symmetric polarization branch via a cross-domain feature transform. In addition, we establish a composite-degradation polarization benchmark to support all-in-one restoration research. Extensive experiments on public datasets and our proposed benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30728
Event cameras provide a high dynamic range and preserve brightness-change cues in lighting conditions where conventional RGB frames may be noisy or saturated. To benchmark event-guided restoration across a broad illumination range, we organized the SEE Challenge 2026 with the Event-Based Multimodal Vision Workshop at ECCV 2026. The task conditions restoration on one or more RGB frames, synchronized events, and a scalar target-brightness statistic provided by the organizers. It uses SEE-600K, which contains 610,126 image-event observations from 202 real-world scenes spanning low-light, normal-light, and high-light conditions with illumination variations of up to 1,000$\times$. The challenge follows an open-system protocol: participants may use different temporal contexts, architectures, pretrained weights, test-time augmentation, and post-processing strategies. PSNR determines the ranking, and SSIM is reported as a secondary metric. Around 70 teams registered interest and 15 valid CodaBench submissions were received. Six distinct teams completed organizer-side identity and technical verification, provided method descriptions, checkpoints, inference code, and instructions, and are included in the verified open-system ranking reported here. Beyond the ranking, this report analyzes exposure subsets, semantically distinct test cases, a shared failure pattern, system design choices, and inference strategies. The top systems obtain closely spaced average scores, while the best-performing method varies across cases and metrics; under severe underexposure, all verified systems retain visible local errors.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.29347
Image denoising remains a fundamental problem in image restoration, with applications in photography, biomedical, and scientific imaging. Modern deep neural networks achieve strong performance by learning powerful image priors, but often rely on large black-box models with limited interpretability. In contrast, DCT-based sliding-window and collaborative filtering methods such as BM3D offer clear algorithmic structure, but depend on handcrafted and non-differentiable operations. This work studies how far such structured collaborative filtering principles can be pushed when reformulated as trainable models. We introduce DeepBM3D, a compact fully differentiable architecture that combines non-local patch grouping, DCT-domain filtering, and multi-stage refinement within a BM3D-inspired pipeline. Lightweight convolutional feature extractors guide patch grouping, while filtering is performed through learned Wiener weights in the DCT domain. Experiments show that DeepBM3D improves over classical and hybrid baselines, remains competitive with FFDNet at low and moderate noise levels, and performs particularly well on repetitive textures.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.29334
Existing video deraining methods typically exploit neighboring frames through either explicit alignment or implicit spatiotemporal aggregation. Explicit alignment relies on accurate motion estimation, which can become unreliable under dense rain, while implicit aggregation avoids alignment but lacks explicit guidance on the directional and temporally coherent structure of rain. This leaves a gap between reliable temporal aggregation and explicit modeling of rain motion. To address these limitations, we propose FluidRain, a lightweight video derainer that uses divergence-free rain flow to guide Loop-in-Loop attention across scales and neighboring frames. Motivated by fluid mechanics, we model rain motion as a divergence-free image-space flow and use it to organize multi-scale and temporal aggregation. Specifically, FluidRain first estimates a rain-flow field for each frame and projects it onto the divergence-free subspace. The resulting flow steers window attention along rain streaks, enabling neighboring frames to be aggregated without explicit alignment. Since rain-flow structure is preserved across scales and nearby frames, Loop-in-Loop reuses the same attention operator across both dimensions, resulting in a three-frame model with only 0.80M parameters. Experiments on four benchmarks show that FluidRain remains competitive with substantially larger restoration models. We further examine how temporal evidence scales with different input views. To evaluate whether the model remains reliable when rain motion changes across frames, we introduce RainSyn-Gust, which injects controlled changes in rain-streak direction into existing benchmarks. We also develop a physics-based no-reference metric that evaluates real-rain removal without requiring clean targets.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.29006
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.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.28235
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.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27317
Due to the limited dynamic range of conventional image sensors, captured low dynamic range (LDR) video often suffers from highlight clipping and shadow detail loss, making high-quality high dynamic range (HDR) reconstruction from single-exposure sequences highly challenging without alternating exposures or extra hardware. Alternating-exposure HDR methods sacrifice frame rate and struggle with motion alignment, making them impractical for real-world capture. To address this, we propose RawHDRV, an end-to-end framework for single-exposure Raw video HDR reconstruction, that fundamentally exploits the linear response and channel-specific characteristics of Bayer data. Specifically, it features a channel-decomposition temporal alignment and fusion strategy that processes Bayer channels separately to exploit their distinct exposure characteristics, together with exposure-aware weighted fusion. It further incorporates an exposure complementarity mask-guided restoration module that leverages inter-frame exposure redundancy to adaptively fuse reliable information and suppress saturation artifacts, and introduces a mask-guided color loss that combines normalized error constraints with gradient smoothing to enhance highlight recovery. Furthermore, we construct a large-scale mobile Raw-HDR video dataset with per-frame HDR annotations. Experiments show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art results in all metrics, demonstrating superior spatial quality and temporal stability under extreme exposure conditions. The code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27274
Ground-based planetary imaging suffers from atmospheric turbulence, sensor noise, and limited sampling, making restoration a joint denoising, deblurring, and super-resolution problem. We present ASTRA-SR, a blind single-frame restoration framework trained on a physics-grounded synthetic dataset. High-dynamic-range spacecraft RAW observations serve as clean sources, and paired LR inputs are synthesized using measured layer-integrated turbulence strengths, propagated moving phase screens, exposure-averaged spatially varying PSFs, and sensor this http URL-SR first estimates a noise-suppressed but blur-retaining LR image, then restores spatial structure through multiscale processing and reconstructs HR detail with serial spatial-amplitude refinement. It yields a 0.49 dB foreground PSNR gain over the strongest baseline approaches.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26731
Individual tree crown segmentation from aerial imagery underpins tree-level carbon accounting, biodiversity, and restoration monitoring at landscape scale. However, existing models are predominantly trained on dense canopy forest imagery and degrade in savannah and drylands, where tree crowns are sparse, of variable appearance, and underrepresented in annotated benchmarks. These models also typically depend on costly polygon annotations. We introduce LACE (LAtent Commonality Expectation-maximisation), a box-supervised instance segmentation model, evaluated on 0.1 m/px aerial RGB tree crown imagery. LACE uses a frozen DINOv3-web ViT-L/16 encoder, applied at four spatial offsets and interlaced into a denser feature grid, with a lightweight CenterNet-style detection head trained solely on bounding boxes. We use expectation-maximisation to separate recurring appearance, the "treeness", within bounding boxes from surroundings. On the OAM-TCD benchmark test set, LACE reaches a mask AP$_{50}$ of $0.663 \pm 0.001$ (3 seeds) trained on 900 box-annotated images and without mask annotations, above the 0.626 scored by Restor's released mask-supervised Mask R-CNN, which was trained on the full ~4.2k image set. On a sparse-canopy holdout set, mask AP$_{50}$ rises to $0.691$ versus $0.612$ for Detectree2, a mask-supervised baseline. On NeonTreeEvaluation, using the official evaluation code, LACE reaches $0.728 \pm 0.003$ F1@0.4 (5 seeds) from 23,424 hand-annotated RGB boxes alone, matching the authors' DeepForest model's published 0.719, using under 0.1% of its training annotations and none of its LiDAR-derived 30M-crown pretraining set. By leveraging frozen self-supervised features, LACE matches or surpasses fully-supervised specialist baselines from boxes alone, removing the need for polygon annotation in tree crown instance segmentation for sparse-canopy environments where labelled data is scarce.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26549
Scattered light is common in biomedical images, yet its removal remains challenging. The difficulty arises from three aspects: first, aligned scattered-light-free biomedical ground truth is often unavailable; second, scattering is coupled with weak illumination and sensor-induced noise; and third, many learning-based restoration models are computationally expensive for embedded devices in Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) scenarios. To address these issues, this paper proposes PP-Net, a hybrid physical-prior neural network for biomedical scattered light removal. The proposed method consists of three components: DFN-Net suppresses sensor-induced noise, ASAP estimates the scattering map and recovers a physics-based prior map, and GF-Net refines the prior map by fusing it with the denoised observation. To reduce the dependence on paired biomedical ground truth, a progressive synthetic training and cross-domain transfer strategy is developed. Experiments show that the physical-prior branch improves the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) by up to 1.26 dB on paired synthetic benchmarks. Under joint noise-and-scattering degradation, PP-Net improves PSNR by more than 10.8 dB and the structural similarity index measure (SSIM) by more than 0.62 compared with representative baseline methods. On real W2S biomedical images, the proposed method reduces the average Natural Image Quality Evaluator (NIQE) score by 43.3\%. Edge deployment with RKNN conversion and INT8 quantization achieves an average inference latency of approximately 200 ms per $512\times512$ image over 360 test images. These results demonstrate that PP-Net provides an effective and deployable solution for microscopic imaging, endoscopic inspection, and edge-assisted biomedical analysis in IoMT scenarios.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26474
Speech enhancement (SE) models typically rely on supervised learning with paired data examples where clean speech is synthetically degraded. This paradigm limits performance in real-world scenarios where the target environment's specific acoustic characteristics are unknown. We propose a fully unpaired SE framework that uses principled Diffusion Schrödinger Bridges (DSB) to learn a stochastic transport process between a clean and a degraded speech distribution. Algorithms for learning transport maps are computationally heavy since they require simulating differential equations during training, usually at each training step. Therefore, we propose using a high-efficiency Mamba Diffusion Model designed for end-to-end waveform processing. We compare against state-of-the-art methods for speech enhancement, both paired and unpaired, as well as a classical signal processing algorithm. Experimental results show that we are on par or better than the baselines while being orders of magnitude faster during inference. Furthermore, we show that the flexibility of the DSB formulation allows our model to generalize across SE tasks, offering a robust and efficient solution for real-world speech restoration.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26000
Robots operating around pedestrians often reason over a finite set of predicted human futures. Repeated online updates can concentrate this limited prediction budget on dominant destinations and leave plausible alternatives underrepresented or absent, removing those alternatives from the finite representation available to downstream decision making. We introduce Destination Support Restoration (DSR), a causal post-selection operator that repairs destination support without retraining the host predictor or increasing the maintained set size. At a repair step, DSR evaluates a temporary destination-stratified candidate bank from the observed prefix, converts candidate evidence into integer target counts, protects representatives of active modes, and reallocates redundant surplus hypotheses to deficient modes. The maintained and returned sets retain exactly $N$ hypotheses, and DSR replaces at most $\lceil\rho N\rceil$ entries. Protected representatives preserve current categorical support; lineage-aware particle filters also preserve surviving resampling ancestors. Each replacement reduces the allocation mismatch to the evidence-driven target by one. On the complete 3,719-trajectory Edinburgh protocol over three seeds, DSR reduces MIF weighted ADE and FDE by 13.36% and 13.30% at $N=64$. Paired integrations with CLiFF, PPT, causal GDTS, Social Informer, and PECNet improve both metrics in every evaluated pair. These results show that finite-set support allocation is a useful prediction-side control point when a fixed hypothesis set serves as the interface to downstream systems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25942
This work studies prediction parameterization for stochastic generative dynamics in diffusion models. Existing velocity-based generative models provide the simplicity of learning a single transport field, but their standard formulation is deterministic, whereas stochastic extensions generally require additional score information or an intermediate velocity-to-score reconstruction. To retain single-field prediction while directly supporting stochastic reverse dynamics, this paper introduces Mean Velocity Matching (MVM). MVM constructs a Gaussian perturbation process for which the conditional expectation of a restoration-oriented velocity, $(x_0-x_t)/t$, directly forms the reverse-SDE drift. Consequently, a single learned field is sufficient to parameterize the stochastic reverse process without separately estimating or reconstructing the score. Because direct regression of this velocity becomes unbounded near $t=0$, MVM further introduces a $\sqrt{t}$-scaled parameterization that preserves the reverse dynamics while yielding a bounded training target. The same learned field also induces a deterministic probability-flow ODE, enabling stochastic and deterministic sampling to be studied within a unified formulation. Experiments with Transformer-based generative models achieve an FID of $\MVMImageNetThirtyTwoFID$ at \MVMImageNetThirtyTwoNFE\ NFE on ImageNet $32\times32$ and $\MVMImageNetTwoFiftySixFID$ at \MVMImageNetTwoFiftySixNFE\ NFE on ImageNet $256\times256$. Controlled SDE--ODE comparisons further show that the ODE performs better under very low NFE, whereas the stochastic reverse process achieves lower FID when sufficient function evaluations are available. These results demonstrate that MVM provides a direct single-field parameterization of stochastic reverse dynamics while maintaining competitive generation quality.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25444
Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) is an im- portant component of visual sensing systems operating under degraded illumination, including nighttime surveillance, au- tonomous navigation, remote sensing, and inspection in poorly lit industrial environments. Most LLIE methods rely on output- level reconstruction losses that supervise only the final restored image, leaving the intermediate feature recovery process weakly constrained. This paper proposes MirrorDistill, an illumination- aware latent distillation framework that links the low-light and clean domains through feature mirroring. During training, a shared encoder and an exponential-moving-average teacher decoder process the clean reference image to generate clean- domain latent targets. These targets supervise the low-light student at two levels: raw encoder features and standardized multi-scale decoder projections. The alignment is applied layer by layer, while a proposed illumination-aware weighting scheme gives greater emphasis to underexposed regions. The teacher and reference branches are used only during training, so inference requires only the lightweight student encoder-decoder and in- troduces no teacher-side computational cost. Under evaluation on the standard LOL benchmarks, MirrorDistill outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the real-captured LOL-v2-Real set, while having the lowest compute complexity (GMACs) and while remaining competitive on the LOL-v1 and LOL-v2-Synthetic datasets. Ablation studies further show the contributions of the encoder mirror, decoder mirror, and illumination-aware weighting. Finally, we release our code as open-source for the benefit of future research.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25331
Degradations vary widely across images, so a practical restoration system has to handle many degradation types with one model. A recent and effective recipe adapts a large pretrained image-editing model to restoration using a small low-rank adapter with a text prompt. We replace that prompt with an instruction derived from the degraded image itself. The image reaches the editor through two paths: its structure comes from the model's VAE, and its semantic instruction comes from a lightweight token mapper that shifts the degraded image's vision-language embedding toward the embedding a clean image would produce. Because the instruction is a continuous vector, scaling it yields a family of valid restorations for tasks whose target is not unique, such as low-light enhancement. We adapt one Qwen-Image-Edit model to six tasks with a single adapter trained in about three hours on one GPU. The image instruction outperforms text conditioning under a matched comparison, and it supports task agnostic restoration without a degradation label, which the text variant does not.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25267
Video recording on smart glasses exposes more than faces. Continuous capture reveals full-body biometric signatures, including gait, posture, and silhouette, that enable person re-identification (ReID) even after conventional face sanitization. We present MIRAGE, a three-tier architecture for privacy-preserving smart glasses that enforces full-body privacy, supports synthetic full-body replacement, and retains encrypted recovery material for consent-based restoration. We implement MIRAGE on a Raspberry Pi~5 (a CPU-only proxy for smart-glasses compute), companion phones, and a cloud generative backend. Compared to prior systems, MIRAGE achieves 0.948 AP and 0.976 AR while accurately detecting the complete visible body. Its bounding box masking reduces learned silhouette-based ReID to essentially random guessing, with 10.86% Rank-1 accuracy compared with an 11.12% measured chance level. Even against an adaptive adversary retrained on MIRAGE's sanitized pose signals, Rank-1 gait identification drops from 90.25% to 26.20%, removing 72.5% of the adversary's identification advantage.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24537
Visual token pruning is a promising approach to reducing the inference cost of large vision-language models (LVLMs), yet aggressive token reduction often causes substantial performance degradation. We identify three key factors behind this degradation: text-guided selection bias, information loss from discarded tokens, and positional distortion caused by sequence compaction. Based on these observations, we propose \textbf{VPRune}, a training-free pre-LLM pruning framework consisting of visual-only diversity selection, similarity-guided token recycling, and position-preserving restoration. Experiments on FastVLM-1.5B across multiple vision-language benchmarks demonstrate that VPRune achieves a favorable accuracy--compression trade-off, with particularly pronounced advantages under aggressive compression. Furthermore, evaluations on edge-device show that VPRune effectively reduces end-to-end inference latency while maintaining superior task performance, demonstrating its practicality for resource-constrained LVLM deployment.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24485
Although deep learning has advanced Whole Slide Image (WSI) Analysis, tissue artifacts like bubbles and folds often cause silent failures by concealing essential morphology. Current pathology image restoration methods are mostly restricted to small patches, struggling to maintain global structural coherence at a megapixel scale. We introduce RestorePath, a framework for globally consistent megapixel scale inpainting that reconstructs diagnostic structures in histological image to prevent incorrect high-confidence predictions and lower error rates. Our model utilizes a Latent Diffusion Model (LDM) conditioned on Pathology Foundation Model (PFM) embeddings, integrating Large Kernel Attention (LKA) to manage long-range dependencies during random patch diffusion. Enhanced by Distance-Weighted Interpolation (DWI) and an Adaptive Guidance Scale (AGS), RestorePath ensures structural consistency and fidelity by modulating information from surrounding patches. Evaluations across TCGA-BRCA, BACH, and Camelyon16 datasets for images ranging from 512 to 4608 pixels demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in maintaining histological consistency. RestorePath significantly improves downstream Computational Pathology (CP) tasks, outperforming both raw artifact images and the conventional Detect-and-Discard (D&D) approach. The code is available at this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24116
Long-term embodied AI will undergo learning, model updates, memory compression, hardware repair, and migration across embodiments. For users who have formed sustained relationships with such systems, these changes raise not only a problem of product consistency but also one of identity continuity: whether the changed system is still experienced as the same particular agent. Existing research suggests that human-AI relationships may develop relational particularity, that robotics and artificial-identity research has identified identity and migration signals across embodiments, and that major updates or platform disruptions can be accompanied by relational loss and restoration desire. This article proposes a user-side framework in which long-term embodied AI is represented through an agent-specific identity representation organized by at least three open identity-content domains: embodied-perceptual, psychological-behavioral, and relational-autobiographical. Information from these domains is not equally weighted; shared history, relational roles, and contingent responsiveness may make some information more identity-diagnostic than others. After system change, users may integrate continuity and discontinuity evidence in a weighted manner, yielding judgments along a continuum from relatively strong identity continuity through ambiguity or partial continuity to clear identity discontinuity. Causal-historical provenance and user participation are treated as contextual evidence rather than a fourth identity-content domain. The framework also proposes identity continuity as a psychological objective for lifecycle design, including memory selection, model updating, and migration across embodiments, under constraints of privacy and user control.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23356
We present Apollo Restore, a 24-billion-parameter large language model for restoring lacunae---physical gaps---in fragmentary Ancient Greek texts. Fine-tuned from Mistral Small with a fill-in-the-middle objective, Apollo Restore reconstructs missing spans without requiring oracle knowledge of their length. To our knowledge, it is the first large-scale decoder model for historical Greek, and the first for any ancient Mediterranean language. Evaluated as in prior work, on short gaps of up to ten characters, Apollo Restore places the correct restoration among its top twenty candidates for 80.6%/54.6%/61.0% of documentary-papyrus, literary-papyrus, and stone-inscription lacunae, exceeding the strongest published models by $1.6\times$/$2.6\times$/$1.4\times$. Prior evaluation protocols, however, inflate scores through a bias toward trivially short gaps; under a length-balanced metric Apollo Restore's advantage over the strongest published models grows to $2.3\times$/$3.5\times$/$1.6\times$ and degrades gracefully, even given incorrect length hints. In a blind study, 20 expert papyrologists, epigraphists, and philologists strongly preferred Apollo Restore to the strongest baseline and judged its performance at least as good as human restorations in 77% of cases. Apollo Restore also improves the published reading of this http URL. 1667---a papyrus roll carbonised in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE and digitally unrolled and edited after Apollo Restore's training data was compiled. Apollo Restore is an output of the Decoding Antiquity initiative to build specialized LLMs for historical languages and manuscripts, led by the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22455