Uni-Removal: A Semi-Supervised Framework for Simultaneously Addressing Multiple Degradations in Real-World Images

TL;DR

Uni-Removal is a semi-supervised framework that effectively removes multiple degradations like haze, rain, and blur from real-world images by leveraging knowledge transfer and domain adaptation techniques.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel two-stage semi-supervised approach with multi-teacher knowledge transfer and adversarial domain adaptation for real-world multi-degradation removal.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods on real-world datasets

Effectively handles multiple degradations simultaneously

Demonstrates strong generalization to real-world images

Abstract

Removing multiple degradations, such as haze, rain, and blur, from real-world images poses a challenging and illposed problem. Recently, unified models that can handle different degradations have been proposed and yield promising results. However, these approaches focus on synthetic images and experience a significant performance drop when applied to realworld images. In this paper, we introduce Uni-Removal, a twostage semi-supervised framework for addressing the removal of multiple degradations in real-world images using a unified model and parameters. In the knowledge transfer stage, Uni-Removal leverages a supervised multi-teacher and student architecture in the knowledge transfer stage to facilitate learning from pretrained teacher networks specialized in different degradation types. A multi-grained contrastive loss is introduced to enhance learning from feature and image spaces. In the domain adaptation stage, unsupervised fine-tuning is performed by incorporating an adversarial discriminator on real-world images. The integration of an extended multi-grained contrastive loss and generative adversarial loss enables the adaptation of the student network from synthetic to real-world domains. Extensive experiments on real-world degraded datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. We compare our Uni-Removal framework with state-of-the-art supervised and unsupervised methods, showcasing its promising results in real-world image dehazing, deraining, and deblurring simultaneously.