PromptRestorer: A Prompting Image Restoration Method with Degradation Perception

We show that raw degradation features can effectively guide deep restoration models, providing accurate degradation priors to facilitate better restoration. While networks that do not consider them for restoration forget gradually degradation during the learning process, model capacity is severely hindered. To address this, we propose a Prompting image Restorer, termed as PromptRestorer. Specifically, PromptRestorer contains two branches: a restoration branch and a prompting branch. The former is used to restore images, while the latter perceives degradation priors to prompt the restoration branch with reliable perceived content to guide the restoration process for better recovery. To better perceive the degradation which is extracted by a pre-trained model from given degradation observations, we propose a prompting degradation perception modulator, which adequately considers the characters of the self-attention mechanism and pixel-wise modulation, to better perceive the degradation priors from global and local perspectives. To control the propagation of the perceived content for the restoration branch, we propose gated degradation perception propagation, enabling the restoration branch to adaptively learn more useful features for better recovery. Extensive experimental results show that our PromptRestorer achieves state-of-the-art results on 4 image restoration tasks, including image deraining, deblurring, dehazing, and desnowing.