Diff-Restorer: Unleashing Visual Prompts for Diffusion-based Universal Image Restoration

Image restoration is a classic low-level problem aimed at recovering high-quality images from low-quality images with various degradations such as blur, noise, rain, haze, etc. However, due to the inherent complexity and non-uniqueness of degradation in real-world images, it is challenging for a model trained for single tasks to handle real-world restoration problems effectively. Moreover, existing methods often suffer from over-smoothing and lack of realism in the restored results. To address these issues, we propose Diff-Restorer, a universal image restoration method based on the diffusion model, aiming to leverage the prior knowledge of Stable Diffusion to remove degradation while generating high perceptual quality restoration results. Specifically, we utilize the pre-trained visual language model to extract visual prompts from degraded images, including semantic and degradation embeddings. The semantic embeddings serve as content prompts to guide the diffusion model for generation. In contrast, the degradation embeddings modulate the Image-guided Control Module to generate spatial priors for controlling the spatial structure of the diffusion process, ensuring faithfulness to the original image. Additionally, we design a Degradation-aware Decoder to perform structural correction and convert the latent code to the pixel domain. We conducted comprehensive qualitative and quantitative analysis on restoration tasks with different degradations, demonstrating the effectiveness and superiority of our approach.

MRIR: Integrating Multimodal Insights for Diffusion-based Realistic Image Restoration

Realistic image restoration is a crucial task in computer vision, and the use of diffusion-based models for image restoration has garnered significant attention due to their ability to produce realistic results. However, the quality of the generated images is still a significant challenge due to the severity of image degradation and the uncontrollability of the diffusion model. In this work, we delve into the potential of utilizing pre-trained stable diffusion for image restoration and propose MRIR, a diffusion-based restoration method with multimodal insights. Specifically, we explore the problem from two perspectives: textual level and visual level. For the textual level, we harness the power of the pre-trained multimodal large language model to infer meaningful semantic information from low-quality images. Furthermore, we employ the CLIP image encoder with a designed Refine Layer to capture image details as a supplement. For the visual level, we mainly focus on the pixel level control. Thus, we utilize a Pixel-level Processor and ControlNet to control spatial structures. Finally, we integrate the aforementioned control information into the denoising U-Net using multi-level attention mechanisms and realize controllable image restoration with multimodal insights. The qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate our method's superiority over other state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

Multimodal Semantic-Aware Automatic Colorization with Diffusion Prior

Colorizing grayscale images offers an engaging visual experience. Existing automatic colorization methods often fail to generate satisfactory results due to incorrect semantic colors and unsaturated colors. In this work, we propose an automatic colorization pipeline to overcome these challenges. We leverage the extraordinary generative ability of the diffusion prior to synthesize color with plausible semantics. To overcome the artifacts introduced by the diffusion prior, we apply the luminance conditional guidance. Moreover, we adopt multimodal high-level semantic priors to help the model understand the image content and deliver saturated colors. Besides, a luminance-aware decoder is designed to restore details and enhance overall visual quality. The proposed pipeline synthesizes saturated colors while maintaining plausible semantics. Experiments indicate that our proposed method considers both diversity and fidelity, surpassing previous methods in terms of perceptual realism and gain most human preference.