The reliability of vision-based systems, such as traffic monitoring and intelligent driving, is typically compromised in hazy weather owing to diminished visibility. In this paper, we propose a novel efficient image dehazing framework guided by depth order, leveraging the consistency of depth perception to establish strong global constraints for enhanced haze removal. The consistent depth perception ensures that the regions that look farther or closer in hazy images also appear farther or closer in the corresponding dehazing results, substantially avoiding potential visual degradation. To this end, the depth order in hazy images is approximated by the reverse order of color difference between pixel values and global atmospheric light, offering an effective and efficient alternative for depth perception modeling. Subsequently, we have developed a depth order embedded transformation model to estimate the transmission maps jointly constrained by depth order and haze imaging model, ensuring that the depth order remains unchanged in corresponding dehazing results. This model harnesses the extracted depth order as a powerful global constraint for the dehazing process, facilitating the efficient use of global information and thus achieving superior image restoration. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can better recover potential structure and vivid color with higher computational efficiency, offering an efficient solution for robust traffic monitoring against hazy weather.

In this paper, we observe that the collaboration of various foundation models can perceive semantic and degraded information within images, thereby guiding the low-light enhancement process. Specifically, we propose a self-supervised low-light enhancement framework based on the multiple foundation models collaboration (dubbed FoCo), aimed at improving both the visual quality of enhanced images and the performance in high-level applications. At the feature level, FoCo leverages the rich features from various foundation models to enhance the model’s semantic perception during training, thereby reducing the gap between enhanced results and high-quality images from a high-level perspective. At the task level, we exploit the robustness-gap between strong foundation models and weak models, applying high-level task guidance to the low-light enhancement training process. Through the collaboration of multiple foundation models, the proposed framework shows better enhancement performance and adapts better to high-level tasks. Extensive experiments across various enhancement and application benchmarks demonstrate the qualitative and quantitative superiority of the proposed method over numerous state-of-the-art techniques.

In this work, we observe that the generators, which are pre-trained on massive natural images, inherently hold the promising potential for superior low-light image enhancement against varying scenarios. Specifically, for the low-light image enhancement process of a single image, we introduce the pre-trained generators to restore the details and colors degraded by low-light conditions, thereby improving the visual effect. Taking one step further, we introduce a novel optimization strategy, which backpropagates the gradients to the input seeds rather than the parameters of the low-light image enhancement model, thus intactly retaining the generative knowledge learned from natural images and achieving faster convergence speed. Benefiting from the pre-trained knowledge and seed-optimization strategy, the low-light image enhancement model can significantly regularize the visibility and fidelity of the enhanced result, thus rapidly generating high-quality images without training on any low-light dataset. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, showing its potential advantages over numerous state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Learning-based video denoisers have attained state-of-the-art (SOTA) performances on public evaluation benchmarks. Nevertheless, they typically encounter significant performance drops when applied to unseen real-world data, owing to inherent data discrepancies. To address this problem, this work delves into the model pretraining techniques and proposes masked central frame modeling (MCFM), a new video pretraining approach that significantly improves the generalization ability of the denoiser. This proposal stems from a key observation: pretraining denoiser by reconstructing intact videos from the corrupted sequences, where the central frames are masked at a suitable probability, contributes to achieving superior performance on real-world data. Building upon MCFM, we introduce a robust video denoiser, named MVDenoiser, which is firstly pretrained on massive available ordinary videos for general video modeling, and then finetuned on costful real-world noisy/clean video pairs for noisy-to-clean mapping. Additionally, beyond the denoising model, we further establish a new paired real-world noisy video dataset (RNVD) to facilitate cross-dataset evaluation of generalization ability. Extensive experiments conducted across different datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance compared to existing methods. Code and dataset are available athttps://github.com/mxxx99/MVDenoiser.