Existing image restoration and enhancement (IRE) methods suffer from three fundamental limitations: 1) they present a high technical barrier, requiring expert knowledge and lacking intuitive natural language control; 2) they are inflexible and poorly adaptable, as models are typically designed for single, specific degradations and fail on complex or mixed real-world scenarios; and 3) they lack interactivity and ignore subjectivity, operating as "closed-box" tools that cannot incorporate human feedback or understand nuanced user intentions. To overcome these challenges, we pioneer a novel paradigm: a Multi-Agent System (MAS) for interactive and adaptive image restoration. We design and implement a prototype system, Interactive and Adaptive Multi-Agent System (IAMAgent), which orchestrates a team of specialized agents to collaboratively solve complex IRE tasks. At its core, a Manager Agent, driven by a Large Language Model, interprets user commands, devises strategies, and allocates sub-tasks. It directs a Perception Agent for degradation diagnosis, a suite of specialized Execution Agents that encapsulate various low-level vision models, and a Critique Agent for automated quality assessment. This collaborative framework enables an innovative, language-driven, and human-in-the-loop optimization process. Our work is the first to introduce the MAS paradigm to the IRE domain, transforming it from a collection of static tools into a dynamic, user-centric, and intelligent system. We demonstrate that IAMAgent not only significantly enhances restoration performance and adaptability but also bridges the critical gap between high-level human intention and low-level vision tasks.

Performing an object detection task after the restoration of a hazy image, or rather detecting with the network backbone directly, will result in the inclusion of information mixed with dehazing, which tends to interfere with detection performance. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework for detecting objects in dehazed images via Dual Cross-Stage Partial Learning (DCSP). Specifically, we introduce a Cross-Stage Partial (CSP) module for extracting clean feature information after dehazing. Secondly, to enhance data integrity, we employ a skip-input strategy to supplement information related to object detection features that may be lost during the dehazing task, while avoiding the gradient vanishing problem. In addition, CSP is also introduced to facilitate comprehensive learning of multiple feature representations. Finally, to avoid the inclusion of irrelevant dehazing information in detection, we apply a Ground-Truth Flow at detection network (at dark3), for fine feature information calibration. Additionally, we created a synthetic fog dataset to expand the training data for DCSP. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed method. The code is available at https://github.com/zhaojinbiao/DCSP.

Recent advances in single image super-resolution (SISR) have achieved remarkable performance through deep learning. However, the high computational cost hinders the deployment of SISR models on edge devices. Instead of proposing new SISR models, a new trend is emerging to improve network efficiency by reducing parameters, FLOPs, and inference time through slight modifications to the original models. However, recent methods usually focus on reducing only one of three metrics, i.e., FLOPs, parameters and inference time, which inevitably increases the other two metrics. In this paper, we propose a novel Adaptive Student Inference Network (ASIN) on popular SISR models, which aims at reducing FLOPs and inference time while maintaining the number of parameters and restoring clearer high-resolution images. Specifically, our ASIN divides a SISR model into three components (head, body and tail) and adopts various strategies for each part. For head and tail parts, to ensure the restored images contain more detailed information, a novel auxiliary Enhanced Teacher Network (ETNet) is designed, which is trained with the ground-truth images to obtain more prior knowledge to guide student network to extract more accurate textures using a new knowledge distillation method. For the body part, owing to the varying difficulties of the reconstructions in different regions, we propose an Adaptive Depth Predicted Module (ADPM) to dynamically shorten average depth of network to reduce the computational cost of overall network. Extensive experiments on two datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and state-of-the-art performance of our ASIN compared to its counterparts.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are powerful for image representation, but the convolution operation may be influenced and degraded by the included noise, and the deep features may not be fully learned. In this paper, we propose a new encoder-decoder based image restoration network, termed Robust Low-Rank Convolution Network with Feature Denoising (LRCnet). LRCnet presents a novel low-rank convolution (LR-Conv) for image representation, and a residual dense connection (RDC) for feature fusion between encoding and decoding. Different from directly splitting convolution into ordinary convolution and mirror convolution as existing work, LR-Conv deploys a feature denoising module after the ordinary convolution to remove noise for mirror convolution. A low-rank embedding process is then used to project the convolutional features into a robust low-rank subspace, which can retain the local geometry of input signal to some extent and separate the signal and noise by finding low-rank structure of features to reduce the impact of noise on convolution. Besides, most networks increase the depth of network simply to obtain deep information and lack of effective connections to fuse the multilevel features, which may not fully discover the deep features in various layers. Thus, we design a residual dense connection with a channel attention to connect multilevel feature effectively to obtain more useful information to enhance the data representation. Extensive experiments on several datasets verified the effectiveness of LRCnet for image denoising.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs)-guided deep models have obtained impressive performance for image representation, however the representation ability may still be restricted and usually needs more epochs to make the model converge in training, due to the useful information loss during the convolution and pooling operations. We therefore propose a general feature recovery layer, termed Low-rank Deep Feature Recovery (LDFR), to enhance the representation ability of the convolutional features by seamlessly integrating low-rank recovery into CNNs, which can be easily extended to all existing CNNs-based models. To be specific, to recover the lost information during the convolution operation, LDFR aims at learning the low-rank projections to embed the feature maps onto a low-rank subspace based on some selected informative convolutional feature maps. Such low-rank recovery operation can ensure all convolutional feature maps to be reconstructed easily to recover the underlying subspace with more useful and detailed information discovered, e.g., the strokes of characters or the texture information of clothes can be enhanced after LDFR. In addition, to make the learnt low-rank subspaces more powerful for feature recovery, we design a fusion strategy to obtain a generalized subspace, which averages over all learnt sub-spaces in each LDFR layer, so that the convolutional feature maps in test phase can be recovered effectively via low-rank embedding. Extensive results on several image datasets show that existing CNNs-based models equipped with our LDFR layer can obtain better performance.

Low-rank coding-based representation learning is powerful for discovering and recovering the subspace structures in data, which has obtained an impressive performance; however, it still cannot obtain deep hidden information due to the essence of single-layer structures. In this article, we investigate the deep low-rank representation of images in a progressive way by presenting a novel strategy that can extend existing single-layer latent low-rank models into multiple layers. Technically, we propose a new progressive Deep Latent Low-Rank Fusion Network (DLRF-Net) to uncover deep features and the clustering structures embedded in latent subspaces. The basic idea of DLRF-Net is to progressively refine the principal and salient features in each layer from previous layers by fusing the clustering and projective subspaces, respectively, which can potentially learn more accurate features and subspaces. To obtain deep hidden information, DLRF-Net inputs shallow features from the last layer into subsequent layers. Then, it aims at recovering the hierarchical information and deeper features by respectively congregating the subspaces in each layer of the network. As such, one can also ensure the representation learning of deeper layers to remove the noise and discover the underlying clean subspaces, which will be verified by simulations. It is noteworthy that the framework of our DLRF-Net is general and is applicable to most existing latent low-rank representation models, i.e., existing latent low-rank models can be easily extended to the multilayer scenario using DLRF-Net. Extensive results on real databases show that our framework can deliver enhanced performance over other related techniques.

Low-rank representation is powerful for recover-ing and clustering the subspace structures, but it cannot obtain deep hierarchical information due to the single-layer mode. In this paper, we present a new and effective strategy to extend the sin-gle-layer latent low-rank models into multi-ple-layers, and propose a new and progressive Deep Latent Low-Rank Fusion Network (DLRF-Net) to uncover deep features and struc-tures embedded in input data. The basic idea of DLRF-Net is to refine features progressively from the previous layers by fusing the subspaces in each layer, which can potentially obtain accurate fea-tures and subspaces for representation. To learn deep information, DLRF-Net inputs shallow fea-tures of the last layers into subsequent layers. Then, it recovers the deeper features and hierar-chical information by congregating the projective subspaces and clustering subspaces respectively in each layer. Thus, one can learn hierarchical sub-spaces, remove noise and discover the underlying clean subspaces. Note that most existing latent low-rank coding models can be extended to multi-layers using DLRF-Net. Extensive results show that our network can deliver enhanced perfor-mance over other related frameworks.

We propose a joint subspace recovery and enhanced locality-based robust flexible label consistent dictionary learning method called Robust Flexible Discriminative Dictionary Learning (RFDDL). The RFDDL mainly improves the data representation and classification abilities by enhancing the robust property to sparse errors and encoding the locality, reconstruction error, and label consistency more accurately. First, for the robustness to noise and sparse errors in data and atoms, the RFDDL aims at recovering the underlying clean data and clean atom subspaces jointly, and then performs DL and encodes the locality in the recovered subspaces. Second, to enable the data sampled from a nonlinear manifold to be handled potentially and obtain the accurate reconstruction by avoiding the overfitting, the RFDDL minimizes the reconstruction error in a flexible manner. Third, to encode the label consistency accurately, the RFDDL involves a discriminative flexible sparse code error to encourage the coefficients to be soft. Fourth, to encode the locality well, the RFDDL defines the Laplacian matrix over recovered atoms, includes label information of atoms in terms of intra-class compactness and inter-class separation, and associates with group sparse codes and classifier to obtain the accurate discriminative locality-constrained coefficients and classifier. The extensive results on public databases show the effectiveness of our RFDDL.

In this paper, we investigate the robust dictionary learning (DL) to discover the hybrid salient low-rank and sparse representation in a factorized compressed space. A Joint Robust Factorization and Projective Dictionary Learning (J-RFDL) model is presented. The setting of J-RFDL aims at improving the data representations by enhancing the robustness to outliers and noise in data, encoding the reconstruction error more accurately and obtaining hybrid salient coefficients with accurate reconstruction ability. Specifically, J-RFDL performs the robust representation by DL in a factorized compressed space to eliminate the negative effects of noise and outliers on the results, which can also make the DL process efficient. To make the encoding process robust to noise in data, J-RFDL clearly uses sparse L2, 1-norm that can potentially minimize the factorization and reconstruction errors jointly by forcing rows of the reconstruction errors to be zeros. To deliver salient coefficients with good structures to reconstruct given data well, J-RFDL imposes the joint low-rank and sparse constraints on the embedded coefficients with a synthesis dictionary. Based on the hybrid salient coefficients, we also extend J-RFDL for the joint classification and propose a discriminative J-RFDL model, which can improve the discriminating abilities of learnt coefficients by minimizing the classification error jointly. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that our formulations can deliver superior performance over other state-of-the-art methods.

We propose a novel and unsupervised representation learning model, i.e., Robust Block-Diagonal Adaptive Locality-constrained Latent Representation (rBDLR). rBDLR is able to recover multi-subspace structures and extract the adaptive locality-preserving salient features jointly. Leveraging on the Frobenius-norm based latent low-rank representation model, rBDLR jointly learns the coding coefficients and salient features, and improves the results by enhancing the robustness to outliers and errors in given data, preserving local information of salient features adaptively and ensuring the block-diagonal structures of the coefficients. To improve the robustness, we perform the latent representation and adaptive weighting in a recovered clean data space. To force the coefficients to be block-diagonal, we perform auto-weighting by minimizing the reconstruction error based on salient features, constrained using a block-diagonal regularizer. This ensures that a strict block-diagonal weight matrix can be obtained and salient features will possess the adaptive locality preserving ability. By minimizing the difference between the coefficient and weights matrices, we can obtain a block-diagonal coefficients matrix and it can also propagate and exchange useful information between salient features and coefficients. Extensive results demonstrate the superiority of rBDLR over other state-of-the-art methods.

In this paper, we discuss the robust factorization based robust dictionary learning problem for data representation. A Robust Projective Low-Rank and Sparse Representation model (R-PLSR) is technically proposed. Our R-PLSR model integrates the L1-norm based robust factorization and robust low-rank & sparse representation by robust dictionary learning into a unified framework. Specifically, R-PLSR performs the joint low-rank and sparse representation over the informative low-dimensional representations by robust sparse factorization so that the results are more accurate. To make the factorization and representation procedures robust to noise and outliers, R-PLSR imposes the sparse L2, 1-norm jointly on the reconstruction errors based on the factorization and dictionary learning. Note that L2, 1-norm can also minimize the reconstruction error as much as possible, since the L2, 1-norm theoretically tends to force many rows of the reconstruction error matrix to be zeros. The Nuclear-norm and L1-norm are jointly used on the representation coefficients so that salient representations can be obtained. Extensive results on several image datasets show that our R-PLSR formulation can deliver superior performance over other state-of-the-arts.