NTIRE 2026 The Second Challenge on Day and Night Raindrop Removal for Dual-Focused Images: Methods and Results

TL;DR

The NTIRE 2026 challenge focused on developing and benchmarking methods for removing raindrops from dual-focused images under diverse lighting conditions, utilizing a large real-world dataset.

Contribution

This paper introduces the second edition of the challenge, providing a new dataset, evaluation framework, and benchmarking results for raindrop removal in complex scenarios.

Findings

17 teams submitted solutions demonstrating significant progress

Methods achieved strong performance on the Raindrop Clarity dataset

The challenge attracted 168 registered teams, indicating high interest

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of the NTIRE 2026 Second Challenge on Day and Night Raindrop Removal for Dual-Focused Images. Building upon the success of the first edition, this challenge attracted a wide range of impressive solutions, all developed and evaluated on our real-world Raindrop Clarity dataset~\cite{jin2024raindrop}. For this edition, we adjust the dataset with 14,139 images for training, 407 images for validation, and 593 images for testing. The primary goal of this challenge is to establish a strong and practical benchmark for the removal of raindrops under various illumination and focus conditions. In total, 168 teams have registered for the competition, and 17 teams submitted valid final solutions and fact sheets for the testing phase. The submitted methods achieved strong performance on the Raindrop Clarity dataset, demonstrating the growing progress in this challenging task.