NTIRE 2025 Challenge on HR Depth from Images of Specular and Transparent Surfaces

This paper reports on the NTIRE 2025 challenge on HR Depth From images of Specular and Transparent surfaces, held in conjunction with the New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement (NTIRE) workshop at CVPR 2025. This challenge aims to advance the research on depth estimation, specifically to address two of the main open issues in the field: high-resolution and non-Lambertian surfaces. The challenge proposes two tracks on stereo and single-image depth estimation, attracting about 177 registered participants. In the final testing stage, 4 and 4 participating teams submitted their models and fact sheets for the two tracks.

Boosting All-in-One Image Restoration via Self-Improved Privilege Learning

Unified image restoration models for diverse and mixed degradations often suffer from unstable optimization dynamics and inter-task conflicts. This paper introduces Self-Improved Privilege Learning (SIPL), a novel paradigm that overcomes these limitations by innovatively extending the utility of privileged information (PI) beyond training into the inference stage. Unlike conventional Privilege Learning, where ground-truth-derived guidance is typically discarded after training, SIPL empowers the model to leverage its own preliminary outputs as pseudo-privileged signals for iterative self-refinement at test time. Central to SIPL is Proxy Fusion, a lightweight module incorporating a learnable Privileged Dictionary. During training, this dictionary distills essential high-frequency and structural priors from privileged feature representations. Critically, at inference, the same learned dictionary then interacts with features derived from the model's initial restoration, facilitating a self-correction loop. SIPL can be seamlessly integrated into various backbone architectures, offering substantial performance improvements with minimal computational overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SIPL significantly advances the state-of-the-art on diverse all-in-one image restoration benchmarks. For instance, when integrated with the PromptIR model, SIPL achieves remarkable PSNR improvements of +4.58 dB on composite degradation tasks and +1.28 dB on diverse five-task benchmarks, underscoring its effectiveness and broad applicability. Codes are available at our project page https://github.com/Aitical/SIPL.

Always Clear Depth: Robust Monocular Depth Estimation under Adverse Weather

Monocular depth estimation is critical for applications such as autonomous driving and scene reconstruction. While existing methods perform well under normal scenarios, their performance declines in adverse weather, due to challenging domain shifts and difficulties in extracting scene information. To address this issue, we present a robust monocular depth estimation method called \textbf{ACDepth} from the perspective of high-quality training data generation and domain adaptation. Specifically, we introduce a one-step diffusion model for generating samples that simulate adverse weather conditions, constructing a multi-tuple degradation dataset during training. To ensure the quality of the generated degradation samples, we employ LoRA adapters to fine-tune the generation weights of diffusion model. Additionally, we integrate circular consistency loss and adversarial training to guarantee the fidelity and naturalness of the scene contents. Furthermore, we elaborate on a multi-granularity knowledge distillation strategy (MKD) that encourages the student network to absorb knowledge from both the teacher model and pretrained Depth Anything V2. This strategy guides the student model in learning degradation-agnostic scene information from various degradation inputs. In particular, we introduce an ordinal guidance distillation mechanism (OGD) that encourages the network to focus on uncertain regions through differential ranking, leading to a more precise depth estimation. Experimental results demonstrate that our ACDepth surpasses md4all-DD by 2.50\% for night scene and 2.61\% for rainy scene on the nuScenes dataset in terms of the absRel metric.

RD-UIE: Relation-Driven State Space Modeling for Underwater Image Enhancement

Underwater image enhancement (UIE) is a critical preprocessing step for marine vision applications, where wavelength-dependent attenuation causes severe content degradation and color distortion. While recent state space models like Mamba show potential for long-range dependency modeling, their unfolding operations and fixed scan paths on 1D sequences fail to adapt to local object semantics and global relation modeling, limiting their efficacy in complex underwater environments. To address this, we enhance conventional Mamba with the sorting-based scanning mechanism that dynamically reorders scanning sequences based on statistical distribution of spatial correlation of all pixels. In this way, it encourages the network to prioritize the most informative components--structural and semantic features. Upon building this mechanism, we devise a Visually Self-adaptive State Block (VSSB) that harmonizes dynamic sorting of Mamba with input-dependent dynamic convolution, enabling coherent integration of global context and local relational cues. This exquisite design helps eliminate global focus bias, especially for widely distributed contents, which greatly weakens the statistical frequency. For robust feature extraction and refinement, we design a cross-feature bridge (CFB) to adaptively fuse multi-scale representations. These efforts compose the novel relation-driven Mamba framework for effective UIE (RD-UIE). Extensive experiments on underwater enhancement benchmarks demonstrate RD-UIE outperforms the state-of-the-art approach WMamba in both quantitative metrics and visual fidelity, averagely achieving 0.55 dB performance gain on the three benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/kkoucy/RD-UIE/tree/main

The Fourth Monocular Depth Estimation Challenge

This paper presents the results of the fourth edition of the Monocular Depth Estimation Challenge (MDEC), which focuses on zero-shot generalization to the SYNS-Patches benchmark, a dataset featuring challenging environments in both natural and indoor settings. In this edition, we revised the evaluation protocol to use least-squares alignment with two degrees of freedom to support disparity and affine-invariant predictions. We also revised the baselines and included popular off-the-shelf methods: Depth Anything v2 and Marigold. The challenge received a total of 24 submissions that outperformed the baselines on the test set; 10 of these included a report describing their approach, with most leading methods relying on affine-invariant predictions. The challenge winners improved the 3D F-Score over the previous edition's best result, raising it from 22.58% to 23.05%.

NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Real-World Face Restoration: Methods and Results

This paper provides a review of the NTIRE 2025 challenge on real-world face restoration, highlighting the proposed solutions and the resulting outcomes. The challenge focuses on generating natural, realistic outputs while maintaining identity consistency. Its goal is to advance state-of-the-art solutions for perceptual quality and realism, without imposing constraints on computational resources or training data. The track of the challenge evaluates performance using a weighted image quality assessment (IQA) score and employs the AdaFace model as an identity checker. The competition attracted 141 registrants, with 13 teams submitting valid models, and ultimately, 10 teams achieved a valid score in the final ranking. This collaborative effort advances the performance of real-world face restoration while offering an in-depth overview of the latest trends in the field.

Beyond Degradation Redundancy: Contrastive Prompt Learning for All-in-One Image Restoration

All-in-one image restoration, addressing diverse degradation types with a unified model, presents significant challenges in designing task-specific prompts that effectively guide restoration across multiple degradation scenarios. While adaptive prompt learning enables end-to-end optimization, it often yields overlapping or redundant task representations. Conversely, explicit prompts derived from pretrained classifiers enhance discriminability but may discard critical visual information for reconstruction. To address these limitations, we introduce Contrastive Prompt Learning (CPL), a novel framework that fundamentally enhances prompt-task alignment through two complementary innovations: a \emph{Sparse Prompt Module (SPM)} that efficiently captures degradation-specific features while minimizing redundancy, and a \emph{Contrastive Prompt Regularization (CPR)} that explicitly strengthens task boundaries by incorporating negative prompt samples across different degradation types. Unlike previous approaches that focus primarily on degradation classification, CPL optimizes the critical interaction between prompts and the restoration model itself. Extensive experiments across five comprehensive benchmarks demonstrate that CPL consistently enhances state-of-the-art all-in-one restoration models, achieving significant improvements in both standard multi-task scenarios and challenging composite degradation settings. Our framework establishes new state-of-the-art performance while maintaining parameter efficiency, offering a principled solution for unified image restoration.

Balancing Task-invariant Interaction and Task-specific Adaptation for Unified Image Fusion

Unified image fusion aims to integrate complementary information from multi-source images, enhancing image quality through a unified framework applicable to diverse fusion tasks. While treating all fusion tasks as a unified problem facilitates task-invariant knowledge sharing, it often overlooks task-specific characteristics, thereby limiting the overall performance. Existing general image fusion methods incorporate explicit task identification to enable adaptation to different fusion tasks. However, this dependence during inference restricts the model's generalization to unseen fusion tasks. To address these issues, we propose a novel unified image fusion framework named "TITA", which dynamically balances both Task-invariant Interaction and Task-specific Adaptation. For task-invariant interaction, we introduce the Interaction-enhanced Pixel Attention (IPA) module to enhance pixel-wise interactions for better multi-source complementary information extraction. For task-specific adaptation, the Operation-based Adaptive Fusion (OAF) module dynamically adjusts operation weights based on task properties. Additionally, we incorporate the Fast Adaptive Multitask Optimization (FAMO) strategy to mitigate the impact of gradient conflicts across tasks during joint training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TITA not only achieves competitive performance compared to specialized methods across three image fusion scenarios but also exhibits strong generalization to unseen fusion tasks.

Content-Aware Transformer for All-in-one Image Restoration

Image restoration has witnessed significant advancements with the development of deep learning models. Although Transformer architectures have progressed considerably in recent years, challenges remain, particularly the limited receptive field in window-based self-attention. In this work, we propose DSwinIR, a Deformable Sliding window Transformer for Image Restoration. DSwinIR introduces a novel deformable sliding window self-attention that adaptively adjusts receptive fields based on image content, enabling the attention mechanism to focus on important regions and enhance feature extraction aligned with salient features. Additionally, we introduce a central ensemble pattern to reduce the inclusion of irrelevant content within attention windows. In this way, the proposed DSwinIR model integrates the deformable sliding window Transformer and central ensemble pattern to amplify the strengths of both CNNs and Transformers while mitigating their limitations. Extensive experiments on various image restoration tasks demonstrate that DSwinIR achieves state-of-the-art performance. For example, in image deraining, compared to DRSformer on the SPA dataset, DSwinIR achieves a 0.66 dB PSNR improvement. In all-in-one image restoration, compared to PromptIR, DSwinIR achieves over a 0.66 dB and 1.04 dB improvement on three-task and five-task settings, respectively. Pretrained models and code are available at our project https://github.com/Aitical/DSwinIR.

ControlFusion: A Controllable Image Fusion Framework with Language-Vision Degradation Prompts

Current image fusion methods struggle to address the composite degradations encountered in real-world imaging scenarios and lack the flexibility to accommodate user-specific requirements. In response to these challenges, we propose a controllable image fusion framework with language-vision prompts, termed ControlFusion, which adaptively neutralizes composite degradations. On the one hand, we develop a degraded imaging model that integrates physical imaging mechanisms, including the Retinex theory and atmospheric scattering principle, to simulate composite degradations, thereby providing potential for addressing real-world complex degradations from the data level. On the other hand, we devise a prompt-modulated restoration and fusion network that dynamically enhances features with degradation prompts, enabling our method to accommodate composite degradation of varying levels. Specifically, considering individual variations in quality perception of users, we incorporate a text encoder to embed user-specified degradation types and severity levels as degradation prompts. We also design a spatial-frequency collaborative visual adapter that autonomously perceives degradations in source images, thus eliminating the complete dependence on user instructions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ControlFusion outperforms SOTA fusion methods in fusion quality and degradation handling, particularly in countering real-world and compound degradations with various levels.