Removing Image Artifacts From Scratched Lens Protectors
This addresses image quality issues for mobile device users, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods for specific distortions.
The paper tackles the problem of removing image artifacts caused by scratched lens protectors on mobile devices, which produce varied patterns and are challenging due to flare and mixed interference, and reports that their method outperforms baselines in qualitative and quantitative results.
A protector is placed in front of the camera lens for mobile devices to avoid damage, while the protector itself can be easily scratched accidentally, especially for plastic ones. The artifacts appear in a wide variety of patterns, making it difficult to see through them clearly. Removing image artifacts from the scratched lens protector is inherently challenging due to the occasional flare artifacts and the co-occurring interference within mixed artifacts. Though different methods have been proposed for some specific distortions, they seldom consider such inherent challenges. In our work, we consider the inherent challenges in a unified framework with two cooperative modules, which facilitate the performance boost of each other. We also collect a new dataset from the real world to facilitate training and evaluation purposes. The experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the baselines qualitatively and quantitatively. The code and datasets will be released after acceptance.