Difflare: Removing Image Lens Flare with Latent Diffusion Model
This addresses the challenge of recovering high-quality images from flare-corrupted ones for low-level vision applications, representing an incremental improvement over existing deep learning methods.
The paper tackles the problem of removing lens flare from images by introducing Difflare, a method that leverages pre-trained diffusion models and incorporates physical priors, achieving state-of-the-art performance in real-world flare removal with improved fidelity and perceptual quality.
The recovery of high-quality images from images corrupted by lens flare presents a significant challenge in low-level vision. Contemporary deep learning methods frequently entail training a lens flare removing model from scratch. However, these methods, despite their noticeable success, fail to utilize the generative prior learned by pre-trained models, resulting in unsatisfactory performance in lens flare removal. Furthermore, there are only few works considering the physical priors relevant to flare removal. To address these issues, we introduce Difflare, a novel approach designed for lens flare removal. To leverage the generative prior learned by Pre-Trained Diffusion Models (PTDM), we introduce a trainable Structural Guidance Injection Module (SGIM) aimed at guiding the restoration process with PTDM. Towards more efficient training, we employ Difflare in the latent space. To address information loss resulting from latent compression and the stochastic sampling process of PTDM, we introduce an Adaptive Feature Fusion Module (AFFM), which incorporates the Luminance Gradient Prior (LGP) of lens flare to dynamically regulate feature extraction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed Difflare achieves state-of-the-art performance in real-world lens flare removal, restoring images corrupted by flare with improved fidelity and perceptual quality. The codes will be released soon.