Image restoration is fundamentally constrained by the tradeoff between distortion and perception: minimizing pixel-wise error yields over-smoothed results, whereas optimizing for perceptual realism often introduces structural deviations. Recent approaches attempt to balance this tradeoff via posterior sampling or multi-stage generative pipelines, yet remain computationally expensive and architecturally complex. To overcome these limitations, we propose PCFlow (Perceptually Consistent Flow Matching), a unified framework that directly parameterizes a continuous transport from degraded observations to clean targets, jointly optimizing distortion and perceptual quality. While its latent consistency flow objective drives stable and efficient few-step inference, a Latent Consistency Perceptual Loss (LCPL) imposes semantic constraints directly on the guiding velocity field, steering the dynamics toward visually sharp data manifolds. Furthermore, recognizing the inherent conflict between structural and perceptual consistencies, we integrate a conflict-free gradient projection strategy to stabilize the multi-objective optimization landscape. Combined with lightweight, convolution-only backbone, PCFlow achieves competitive performance across diverse restoration tasks at a fraction of traditional computational costs.

Existing diffusion-based methods have recently made significant progress in image dehazing. However, they typically neglect the physics of haze formation and reconstruct clean images from pure Gaussian noise, thereby limiting their restoration potential. To address this issue, we propose Haze-Noise Diffusion (HNDiff), a novel diffusion framework that embeds the atmospheric scattering model as an inductive bias. By grounding diffusion in physical principles, HNDiff ensures that the restoration aligns more closely with underlying mechanisms of haze formation. In its forward process, we introduce joint haze-noise diffusion with a haze-aware noise scheduler, which progressively adds both haze and noise to an image. Essentially, the scheduler adapts noise levels according to haze density, meaning that regions with heavier haze receive stronger noise injection to encourage content generation, while clearer regions receive lighter noise to better preserve details, which directly links the forward degradation process with the physics of haze. In the reverse process, we then derive a physically consistent dehazing-denoising process that simultaneously removes haze and noise to restore a clean image in a manner aligned with the forward degradation process. To further enhance practicality, we propose Latent HNDiff, which compiles clean latent priors that can be seamlessly integrated into existing dehazing networks to boost performance. Extensive experiments show that our work significantly improves leading dehazing backbones and achieves state-of-the-art results on benchmark datasets. The project page is available at this https URL .

Frame-based cameras with extended exposure times often produce perceptible visual blurring and information loss between frames, significantly degrading video quality. To address this challenge, we introduce EVDI++, a unified self-supervised framework for Event-based Video Deblurring and Interpolation that leverages the high temporal resolution of event cameras to mitigate motion blur and enable intermediate frame prediction. Specifically, the Learnable Double Integral (LDI) network is designed to estimate the mapping relation between reference frames and sharp latent images. Then, we refine the coarse results and optimize overall training efficiency by introducing a learning-based division reconstruction module, enabling images to be converted with varying exposure intervals. We devise an adaptive parameter-free fusion strategy to obtain the final results, utilizing the confidence embedded in the LDI outputs of concurrent events. A self-supervised learning framework is proposed to enable network training with real-world blurry videos and events by exploring the mutual constraints among blurry frames, latent images, and event streams. We further construct a dataset with real world blurry images and events using a DAVIS346c camera, demonstrating the generalizability of the proposed EVDI++ in real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in video deblurring and interpolation tasks.

Reconstructing high-quality images under low bitrate conditions has long been a challenging task. Previous studies have made this task feasible by leveraging the prior knowledge of diffusion models. However, in image compression tasks, the diffusion model baseline fails to adequately integrate advanced semantic information, and the alignment between the diffusion priors and the learning objectives of the compressor is also lacking. To address this issue, we propose the Diffusion Prior Refinement for Efficient Low-rate Image Compression (DiRIC), an image compression scheme based on Stable Diffusion. DiRIC can efficiently encode low-level image information and achieve a highly realistic reconstruction of the original image by leveraging high-level semantic features and the prior knowledge inherent in diffusion models. Specifically, DiRIC employs a multi-feature compressor to represent crucial low-level information with ex tremely low bitrates; meanwhile, it acquires more robust hy brid semantics through a pre-embedding mechanism, providing abundant contextual support for the decoding end. Furthermore, we design a consistency skip module to enhance and refine the diffusion prior. To further improve decoding efficiency, we employ a noise-level estimator to reduce the number of sampling steps, aiming to achieve high-fidelity and efficient decoding. Extensive experimental results show that this method not only achieves the current state-of-the-art perceptual fidelity but also significantly outperforms previous perceptual image compression methods in terms of statistical fidelity. In comparison to SoTA diffusion baselines [1], we have achieved a 147.44% and 84.63% BD Rate improvement in terms of FID and PSNR, alongside a 19× increase in decoding speed.

Image editing has advanced significantly with the development of diffusion models using both inversion-based and instruction-based methods. However, current inversion-based approaches struggle with big modifications (e.g., adding or removing objects) due to the structured nature of inversion noise, which hinders substantial changes. Meanwhile, instruction-based methods often constrain users to black-box operations, limiting direct interaction for specifying editing regions and intensity. To address these limitations, we propose BrushEdit, a novel inpainting-based instruction-guided image editing paradigm, which leverages multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and image inpainting models to enable autonomous, user-friendly, and interactive free-form instruction editing. Specifically, we devise a system enabling free-form instruction editing by integrating MLLMs and a dual-branch image inpainting model in an agentcooperative framework to perform editing category classification, main object identification, mask acquisition, and editing area inpainting. Extensive experiments show that our framework effectively combines MLLMs and inpainting models, achieving superior performance across seven metrics including mask region preservation and editing effect coherence.

Event cameras offer significant advantages for low-light video enhancement, primarily due to their high dynamic range. Current research, however, is severely limited by the absence of large-scale, real-world, and spatio-temporally aligned event-video datasets. To address this, we introduce a large-scale dataset with over 30,000 pairs of frames and events captured under varying illumination. This dataset was curated using a robotic arm that traces a consistent non-linear trajectory, achieving spatial alignment precision under 0.03 mm and temporal alignment with errors under 0.01 s for 90% of the dataset. Based on the dataset, we propose EvLight++, a novel event-guided low-light video enhancement approach designed for robust performance in real-world scenarios. First, we design a multi-scale holistic fusion branch to integrate structural and textural information from both images and events. To counteract variations in regional illumination and noise, we introduce Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR)-guided regional feature selection, enhancing features from high SNR regions and augmenting those from low SNR regions by extracting structural information from events. To incorporate temporal information and ensure temporal coherence, we further introduce a recurrent module and temporal loss in the whole pipeline. Extensive experiments on ours and the synthetic SDSD dataset demonstrate that EvLight++ significantly outperforms both single image- and video-based methods by 1.37 dB and 3.71 dB, respectively. To further explore its potential in downstream tasks like semantic segmentation and monocular depth estimation, we extend our datasets by adding pseudo segmentation and depth labels via meticulous annotation efforts with foundation models. Experiments under diverse low-light scenes show that the enhanced results achieve a 15.97% improvement in mIoU for semantic segmentation.

Multispectral filter array (MSFA) camera is increasingly used due to its compact size and fast capturing speed. However, because of its narrow-band property, it often suffers from the light-deficient problem, and images captured are easily overwhelmed by noise. As a type of commonly used denoising method, neural networks have shown their power to achieve satisfactory denoising results. However, their performance highly depends on high-quality noisy-clean image pairs. For the task of MSFA image denoising, there is currently neither a paired real dataset nor an accurate noise model capable of generating realistic noisy images. To this end, we present a physics-based noise model that is capable to match the real noise distribution and synthesize realistic noisy images. In our noise model, those different types of noise can be divided into SimpleDist component and ComplexDist component. The former contains all the types of noise that can be described using a simple probability distribution like Gaussian or Poisson distribution, and the latter contains the complicated color bias noise that cannot be modeled using a simple probability distribution. Besides, we design a noise-decoupled network consisting of a SimpleDist noise removal network (SNRNet) and a ComplexDist noise removal network (CNRNet) to sequentially remove each component. Moreover, according to the non-uniformity of color bias noise in our noise model, we introduce a learnable position embedding in CNRNet to indicate the position information. To verify the effectiveness of our physics-based noise model and noise-decoupled network, we collect a real MSFA denoising dataset with paired long-exposure clean images and short-exposure noisy images. Experiments are conducted to prove that the network trained using synthetic data generated by our noise model performs as well as trained using paired real data, and our noise-decoupled network outperforms other state-of-the-art denoising methods.

Recently, the mainstream practice for training low-light raw image denoising methods has shifted towards employing synthetic data. Noise modeling, which focuses on characterizing the noise distribution of real-world sensors, profoundly influences the effectiveness and practicality of synthetic data. Currently, physics-based noise modeling struggles to characterize the entire real noise distribution, while learning-based noise modeling impractically depends on paired real data. In this paper, we propose a novel strategy: learning the noise model from dark frames instead of paired real data, to break down the data dependency. Based on this strategy, we introduce an efficient physics-informed noise neural proxy (PNNP) to approximate the real-world sensor noise model. Specifically, we integrate physical priors into neural proxies and introduce three efficient techniques: physics-guided noise decoupling (PND), physics-aware proxy model (PPM), and differentiable distribution loss (DDL). PND decouples the dark frame into different components and handles different levels of noise flexibly, which reduces the complexity of noise modeling. PPM incorporates physical priors to constrain the synthetic noise, which promotes the accuracy of noise modeling. DDL provides explicit and reliable supervision for noise distribution, which promotes the precision of noise modeling. PNNP exhibits powerful potential in characterizing the real noise distribution. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate superior performance in practical low-light raw image denoising. The source code will be publicly available at the https://fenghansen.github.io/publication/PNNP.

Frame-based cameras with extended exposure times often produce perceptible visual blurring and information loss between frames, significantly degrading video quality. To address this challenge, we introduce EVDI++, a unified self-supervised framework for Event-based Video Deblurring and Interpolation that leverages the high temporal resolution of event cameras to mitigate motion blur and enable intermediate frame prediction. Specifically, the Learnable Double Integral (LDI) network is designed to estimate the mapping relation between reference frames and sharp latent images. Then, we refine the coarse results and optimize overall training efficiency by introducing a learning-based division reconstruction module, enabling images to be converted with varying exposure intervals. We devise an adaptive parameter-free fusion strategy to obtain the final results, utilizing the confidence embedded in the LDI outputs of concurrent events. A self-supervised learning framework is proposed to enable network training with real-world blurry videos and events by exploring the mutual constraints among blurry frames, latent images, and event streams. We further construct a dataset with real world blurry images and events using a DAVIS346c camera, demonstrating the generalizability of the proposed EVDI++ in real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in video deblurring and interpolation tasks.