Multiple degraded image restoration via degradation history estimation

Image restoration is a fundamental task in low-level computer vision. Most existing algorithms assume that the input image has a single known degradation type. In reality, images usually contain multiple degradations, making the restoration challenging. Though recent works restore the multiple degraded images, they assume that the degradation history is known. Obviously, such an ideal assumption often does not hold in real applications. This work proposes a novel restoration framework for multiple degraded images via degradation history estimation. Specifically, we first develop a sequential model to estimate the degradation history, including both the degradation operation chain and the corresponding parameters. By resorting to designed self-attention and cross-attention mechanisms, our method can effectively model the correlation of the input image, degradation operation chain, and parameters. Then, we apply our estimation framework for the multiple degraded image restoration, without requiring the degradation history. Experiment results demonstrate much better performance than existing approaches.