When Color-Space Decoupling Meets Diffusion for Adverse-Weather Image Restoration
This addresses the problem of inconsistent image restoration under unpredictable weather conditions for applications like autonomous driving, though it is incremental by building on existing diffusion and color-space methods.
The paper tackles adverse-weather image restoration by proposing LCDiff, a framework that decouples luminance and chrominance in the YCbCr color space and uses a guided diffusion model, achieving state-of-the-art results as demonstrated on the new DriveWeather dataset.
Adverse Weather Image Restoration (AWIR) is a highly challenging task due to the unpredictable and dynamic nature of weather-related degradations. Traditional task-specific methods often fail to generalize to unseen or complex degradation types, while recent prompt-learning approaches depend heavily on the degradation estimation capabilities of vision-language models, resulting in inconsistent restorations. In this paper, we propose \textbf{LCDiff}, a novel framework comprising two key components: \textit{Lumina-Chroma Decomposition Network} (LCDN) and \textit{Lumina-Guided Diffusion Model} (LGDM). LCDN processes degraded images in the YCbCr color space, separately handling degradation-related luminance and degradation-invariant chrominance components. This decomposition effectively mitigates weather-induced degradation while preserving color fidelity. To further enhance restoration quality, LGDM leverages degradation-related luminance information as a guiding condition, eliminating the need for explicit degradation prompts. Additionally, LGDM incorporates a \textit{Dynamic Time Step Loss} to optimize the denoising network, ensuring a balanced recovery of both low- and high-frequency features in the image. Finally, we present DriveWeather, a comprehensive all-weather driving dataset designed to enable robust evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach surpasses state-of-the-art methods, setting a new benchmark in AWIR. The dataset and code are available at: https://github.com/fiwy0527/LCDiff.