LightsOut: Diffusion-based Outpainting for Enhanced Lens Flare Removal
Authors: name: Shr-Ruei Tsai, name: Wei-Cheng Chang, name: Jie-Ying Lee, name: Chih-Hai Su, name: Yu-Lun Liu
Organization: National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University

Lens flare significantly degrades image quality, impacting critical computer
vision tasks like object detection and autonomous driving. Recent Single Image
Flare Removal (SIFR) methods perform poorly when off-frame light sources are
incomplete or absent. We propose LightsOut, a diffusion-based outpainting
framework tailored to enhance SIFR by reconstructing off-frame light sources.
Our method leverages a multitask regression module and LoRA fine-tuned
diffusion model to ensure realistic and physically consistent outpainting
results. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate LightsOut consistently boosts
the performance of existing SIFR methods across challenging scenarios without
additional retraining, serving as a universally applicable plug-and-play
preprocessing solution. Project page: https://ray-1026.github.io/lightsout/