Bingcai Wei

Xin Li, Yeying Jin, Suhang Yao et al.

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.

Jun Shi, Bingcai Wei, Gang Zhou et al.

Although Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have made good progress in image restoration, the intrinsic equivalence and locality of convolutions still constrain further improvements in image quality. Recent vision transformer and self-attention have achieved promising results on various computer vision tasks. However, directly utilizing Transformer for image restoration is a challenging task. In this paper, we introduce an effective hybrid architecture for sand image restoration tasks, which leverages local features from CNN and long-range dependencies captured by transformer to improve the results further. We propose an efficient hybrid structure for sand dust image restoration to solve the feature inconsistency issue between Transformer and CNN. The framework complements each representation by modulating features from the CNN-based and Transformer-based branches rather than simply adding or concatenating features. Experiments demonstrate that SandFormer achieves significant performance improvements in synthetic and real dust scenes compared to previous sand image restoration methods.

Xiang Chen, Hao Li, Jiangxin Dong et al.

This paper presents a review for the LoViF Challenge on Real-World All-in-One Image Restoration. The challenge aimed to advance research on real-world all-in-one image restoration under diverse real-world degradation conditions, including blur, low-light, haze, rain, and snow. It provided a unified benchmark to evaluate the robustness and generalization ability of restoration models across multiple degradation categories within a common framework. The competition attracted 124 registered participants and received 9 valid final submissions with corresponding fact sheets, significantly contributing to the progress of real-world all-in-one image restoration. This report provides a detailed analysis of the submitted methods and corresponding results, emphasizing recent progress in unified real-world image restoration. The analysis highlights effective approaches and establishes a benchmark for future research in real-world low-level vision.

Bingcai Wei

Rainy weather will have a significant impact on the regular operation of the imaging system. Based on this premise, image rain removal has always been a popular branch of low-level visual tasks, especially methods using deep neural networks. However, most neural networks are but-branched, such as only using convolutional neural networks or Transformers, which is unfavourable for the multidimensional fusion of image features. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes a dual-branch attention fusion network. Firstly, a two-branch network structure is proposed. Secondly, an attention fusion module is proposed to selectively fuse the features extracted by the two branches rather than simply adding them. Finally, complete ablation experiments and sufficient comparison experiments prove the rationality and effectiveness of the proposed method.