NTIRE 2026 The Second Challenge on Day and Night Raindrop Removal for Dual-Focused Images: Methods and Results
This challenge provides a benchmark for the specific task of raindrop removal in dual-focused images, but it is an incremental extension of the previous year's challenge.
The NTIRE 2026 challenge on raindrop removal for dual-focused images attracted 168 registered teams, with 17 submitting valid solutions. The best methods achieved strong performance on the Raindrop Clarity dataset (14,139 training, 407 validation, 593 test images), establishing a practical benchmark for raindrop removal under varying illumination and focus.
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.