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Main Authors: Kozłowski, Wojciech, Kuczbański, Radosław, Adamczewski, Kamil, Szczypkowski, Karol, Zięba, Maciej
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01568
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author Kozłowski, Wojciech
Kuczbański, Radosław
Adamczewski, Kamil
Szczypkowski, Karol
Zięba, Maciej
author_facet Kozłowski, Wojciech
Kuczbański, Radosław
Adamczewski, Kamil
Szczypkowski, Karol
Zięba, Maciej
contents Deep stochastic processes have recently become a central paradigm for image enhancement, with many methods explicitly conditioning the stochastic trajectory on the degraded input. However, the relationship between these conditional processes and standard diffusion models remains unclear. In this work, we introduce a unified perspective on stochastic image enhancement by classifying recent methods into three families of continuous-time processes: unconditional diffusion models, Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) processes, and diffusion bridges. We show that all of these approaches arise from a common stochastic differential equation (SDE) formulation. This framework makes explicit that seemingly disparate methods differ primarily in their drift and diffusion terms, terminal distributions, and boundary conditions, while schedulers and samplers constitute orthogonal design choices. Leveraging this unification, we conduct a controlled empirical study across multiple image enhancement tasks using identical architectures and training protocols. Our results reveal no consistently dominant method; instead, we identify and disentangle the specific design choices that most strongly influence performance. Finally, we release ItoVision, a modular PyTorch library that implements the unified framework and enables rapid prototyping and fair comparison of stochastic image enhancement methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_01568
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unifying Deep Stochastic Processes for Image Enhancement
Kozłowski, Wojciech
Kuczbański, Radosław
Adamczewski, Kamil
Szczypkowski, Karol
Zięba, Maciej
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Deep stochastic processes have recently become a central paradigm for image enhancement, with many methods explicitly conditioning the stochastic trajectory on the degraded input. However, the relationship between these conditional processes and standard diffusion models remains unclear. In this work, we introduce a unified perspective on stochastic image enhancement by classifying recent methods into three families of continuous-time processes: unconditional diffusion models, Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) processes, and diffusion bridges. We show that all of these approaches arise from a common stochastic differential equation (SDE) formulation. This framework makes explicit that seemingly disparate methods differ primarily in their drift and diffusion terms, terminal distributions, and boundary conditions, while schedulers and samplers constitute orthogonal design choices. Leveraging this unification, we conduct a controlled empirical study across multiple image enhancement tasks using identical architectures and training protocols. Our results reveal no consistently dominant method; instead, we identify and disentangle the specific design choices that most strongly influence performance. Finally, we release ItoVision, a modular PyTorch library that implements the unified framework and enables rapid prototyping and fair comparison of stochastic image enhancement methods.
title Unifying Deep Stochastic Processes for Image Enhancement
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01568