Title: UniRestorer: Universal Image Restoration via Adaptively Estimating Image Degradation at Proper Granularity
Primary area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities
Keywords: low-level vision, image restoration, all-in-one image restoration

Abstract: Recently, considerable progress has been made in all-in-one image restoration. Generally, existing methods can be degradation-agnostic or degradation-aware. However, the former are limited in leveraging degradation estimation-based priors, and the latter suffer from the inevitable error in degradation estimation. Consequently, the performance of existing methods has a large gap compared to specific single-task models. In this work, we make a step forward in this topic, and present our UniRestorer with improved restoration performance. Specifically, we perform hierarchical clustering on degradation space, and train a multi-granularity mixture-of-experts (MoE) restoration model. Then, UniRestorer adopts both degradation and granularity estimation to adaptively select an appropriate expert for image restoration. In contrast to existing degradation-agnostic and -aware methods, UniRestorer can leverage degradation estimation to benefit degradation-specific restoration, and use granularity estimation to make the model robust to degradation estimation error. Experimental results show that our UniRestorer outperforms state-of-the-art all-in-one methods by a large margin, and is promising in closing the performance gap to specific single-task models. The code and pre-trained models will be publicly available.