Removing Image Artifacts From Scratched Lens Protectors

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel unified framework with two cooperative modules for removing complex scratches and artifacts from camera lens protectors, supported by a new real-world dataset, significantly improving image clarity.

Contribution

The work presents a new unified approach with cooperative modules specifically designed for complex lens protector artifacts, along with a real-world dataset for training and evaluation.

Findings

Outperforms baseline methods qualitatively and quantitatively

Effectively handles flare artifacts and mixed distortions

Provides a new dataset for real-world lens protector artifact removal

Abstract

A protector is placed in front of the camera lens for mobile devices to avoid damage, while the protector itself can be easily scratched accidentally, especially for plastic ones. The artifacts appear in a wide variety of patterns, making it difficult to see through them clearly. Removing image artifacts from the scratched lens protector is inherently challenging due to the occasional flare artifacts and the co-occurring interference within mixed artifacts. Though different methods have been proposed for some specific distortions, they seldom consider such inherent challenges. In our work, we consider the inherent challenges in a unified framework with two cooperative modules, which facilitate the performance boost of each other. We also collect a new dataset from the real world to facilitate training and evaluation purposes. The experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the baselines qualitatively and quantitatively. The code and datasets will be released after acceptance.