InstructRestore: Region-Customized Image Restoration with Human Instructions

Despite the significant progress in diffusion prior-based image restoration for real-world scenarios, most existing methods apply uniform processing to the entire image, lacking the capability to perform region-customized image restoration according to user preferences. In this work, we propose a new framework, namely InstructRestore, to perform region-adjustable image restoration following human instructions. To achieve this, we first develop a data generation engine to produce training triplets, each consisting of a high-quality image, the target region description, and the corresponding region mask. With this engine and careful data screening, we construct a comprehensive dataset comprising 536,945 triplets to support the training and evaluation of this task. We then examine how to integrate the low-quality image features under the ControlNet architecture to adjust the degree of image details enhancement. Consequently, we develop a ControlNet-like model to identify the target region and allocate different integration scales to the target and surrounding regions, enabling region-customized image restoration that aligns with user instructions. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed InstructRestore approach enables effective human-instructed image restoration, including restoration with controllable bokeh blur effects and region-specific restoration with continuous intensity control. Our work advances the investigation of interactive image restoration and enhancement techniques. Data, code, and models are publicly available at https://github.com/shuaizhengliu/InstructRestore.git.