ReviveDiff: A Universal Diffusion Model for Restoring Images in Adverse Weather Conditions

TL;DR

ReviveDiff is a universal diffusion-based network designed to restore images degraded by various adverse weather and environmental conditions, outperforming existing methods across multiple benchmarks.

Contribution

The paper introduces ReviveDiff, a novel universal diffusion model architecture capable of restoring images affected by diverse degradations, unlike prior specialized approaches.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods quantitatively

Effective across seven benchmark datasets

Restores multiple image quality factors

Abstract

Images captured in challenging environments--such as nighttime, smoke, rainy weather, and underwater--often suffer from significant degradation, resulting in a substantial loss of visual quality. The effective restoration of these degraded images is critical for the subsequent vision tasks. While many existing approaches have successfully incorporated specific priors for individual tasks, these tailored solutions limit their applicability to other degradations. In this work, we propose a universal network architecture, dubbed ``ReviveDiff'', which can address various degradations and bring images back to life by enhancing and restoring their quality. Our approach is inspired by the observation that, unlike degradation caused by movement or electronic issues, quality degradation under adverse conditions primarily stems from natural media (such as fog, water, and low luminance), which generally preserves the original structures of objects. To restore the quality of such images, we leveraged the latest advancements in diffusion models and developed ReviveDiff to restore image quality from both macro and micro levels across some key factors determining image quality, such as sharpness, distortion, noise level, dynamic range, and color accuracy. We rigorously evaluated ReviveDiff on seven benchmark datasets covering five types of degrading conditions: Rainy, Underwater, Low-light, Smoke, and Nighttime Hazy. Our experimental results demonstrate that ReviveDiff outperforms the state-of-the-art methods both quantitatively and visually.