Debabrata Mandal

Debabrata Mandal, Soumitri Chattopadhyay, Guansen Tong et al.

Image restoration is essential for enhancing degraded images across computer vision tasks. However, most existing methods address only a single type of degradation (e.g., blur, noise, or haze) at a time, limiting their real-world applicability where multiple degradations often occur simultaneously. In this paper, we propose UniCoRN, a unified image restoration approach capable of handling multiple degradation types simultaneously using a multi-head diffusion model. Specifically, we uncover the potential of low-level visual cues extracted from images in guiding a controllable diffusion model for real-world image restoration and we design a multi-head control network adaptable via a mixture-of-experts strategy. We train our model without any prior assumption of specific degradations, through a smartly designed curriculum learning recipe. Additionally, we also introduce MetaRestore, a metalens imaging benchmark containing images with multiple degradations and artifacts. Extensive evaluations on several challenging datasets, including our benchmark, demonstrate that our method achieves significant performance gains and can robustly restore images with severe degradations. Project page: https://codejaeger.github.io/unicorn-gh

Debabrata Mandal, Soumitri Chattopadhyay, Yujie Wang et al.

Universal image restoration aims to recover clean images from arbitrary real-world degradations using a single inference model. Despite significant progress, existing all-in-one restoration networks do not scale to multiple degradations. As the number of degradations increases, training becomes unstable, models grow excessively large, and performance drops across both seen and unseen domains. In this work, we show that scaling universal restoration is fundamentally limited by interference across degradations during joint learning, leading to catastrophic task forgetting. To address this challenge, we introduce a unified inference pipeline with a multi-branch mixture-of-experts architecture that decomposes restoration knowledge across specialized task-adaptable experts. Our approach enables scalable learning (over sixteen degradations), adapts and generalizes robustly to unseen domains, and supports user-controllable restoration across degradations. Beyond achieving superior performance across benchmarks, this work establishes a new design paradigm for scalable and controllable universal image restoration.

Byeonghyeon Lee, Youbin Kim, Yongjae Jo et al.

Metalens is an emerging optical system with an irreplaceable merit in that it can be manufactured in ultra-thin and compact sizes, which shows great promise in various applications. Despite its advantage in miniaturization, its practicality is constrained by spatially varying aberrations and distortions, which significantly degrade the image quality. Several previous arts have attempted to address different types of aberrations, yet most of them are mainly designed for the traditional bulky lens and ineffective to remedy harsh aberrations of the metalens. While there have existed aberration correction methods specifically for metalens, they still fall short of restoration quality. In this work, we propose a novel aberration correction framework for metalens-captured images, harnessing Vision Transformers (ViT) that have the potential to restore metalens images with non-uniform aberrations. Specifically, we devise a Multiple Adaptive Filters Guidance (MAFG), where multiple Wiener filters enrich the degraded input images with various noise-detail balances and a cross-attention module reweights the features considering the different degrees of aberrations. In addition, we introduce a Spatial and Transposed self-Attention Fusion (STAF) module, which aggregates features from spatial self-attention and transposed self-attention modules to further ameliorate aberration correction. We conduct extensive experiments, including correcting aberrated images and videos, and clean 3D reconstruction. The proposed method outperforms the previous arts by a significant margin. We further fabricate a metalens and verify the practicality of our method by restoring the images captured with the manufactured metalens. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://benhenryl.github.io/Metalens-Transformer.