Zero-shot Single Image Restoration through Controlled Perturbation of Koschmieder’s Model

Real-world image degradation due to light scattering can be described based on the Koschmieder’s model. Training deep models to restore such degraded images is challenging as real-world paired data is scarcely available and synthetic paired data may suffer from domain-shift issues. In this paper, a zero-shot single real-world image restoration model is proposed leveraging a theoretically deduced property of degradation through the Koschmieder’s model. Our zero-shot network estimates the parameters of the Koschmieder’s model, which describes the degradation in the input image, to perform image restoration. We show that a suitable degradation of the input image amounts to a controlled perturbation of the Koschmieder’s model that describes the image’s formation. The optimization of the zero-shot network is achieved by seeking to maintain the relation between its estimates of Koschmieder’s model parameters before and after the controlled perturbation, along with the use of a few no-reference losses. Image dehazing and underwater image restoration are carried out using the proposed zero-shot framework, which in general outperforms the state-of-the-art quantitatively and subjectively on multiple standard real-world image datasets. Additionally, the application of our zero-shot framework for low-light image enhancement is also demonstrated.