Depth-Aware Blind Image Decomposition for Real-World Adverse Weather Recovery

In this paper, we delve into Blind Image Decomposition (BID) tailored for real-world scenarios, aiming to uniformly recover images from diverse, unknown weather combinations and intensities. Our investigation uncovers one inherent gap between the controlled lab settings and the complex real-world environments. In particular, existing BID methods and datasets usually overlook the physical property that adverse weather varies with scene depth rather than a uniform depth, thus constraining their efficiency on real-world photos. To address this limitation, we design an end-to-end Depth-aware Blind Network, namely DeBNet, to explicitly learn the depth-aware transmissivity maps, and further predict the depth-guided noise residual to jointly produce the restored output. Moreover, we employ neural architecture search to adaptively find optimal architectures within our specified search space, considering significant shape and structure differences between multiple degradations. To verify the effectiveness, we further introduce two new BID datasets, namely BID-CityScapes and BID-GTAV, which simulate depth-aware degradations on real-world and synthetic outdoor images, respectively. Extensive experiments on both existing and proposed benchmarks show the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art approaches.