Degradation Frequency Curve: An Explicit Frequency-Quantified Representation for All-in-One Image Restoration

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Main Authors: Huang, Xinghua, Yang, Zhixiong, Wu, Chen, Li, Shengxi, Zhi, Shuaifeng, Zhang, Yue, Hou, Qibin, Deng, Xin, Xia, Jingyuan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Huang, Xinghua
Yang, Zhixiong
Wu, Chen
Li, Shengxi
Zhi, Shuaifeng
Zhang, Yue
Hou, Qibin
Deng, Xin
Xia, Jingyuan
author_facet Huang, Xinghua
Yang, Zhixiong
Wu, Chen
Li, Shengxi
Zhi, Shuaifeng
Zhang, Yue
Hou, Qibin
Deng, Xin
Xia, Jingyuan
contents A fundamental difficulty in all-in-one blind image restoration is that degradation is usually treated as an implicit factor hidden in degraded-to-clean mapping, rather than as an explicit object that can be measured and manipulated. This limitation becomes more pronounced under mixed, compound, or unseen degradation conditions, where degradation effects are hard to assign to predefined labels or task-specific parameters. We propose the Degradation Frequency Curve (DFC), a structured spectral representation that quantifies degradation responses by measuring band-wise residual-to-degraded energy ratios in the frequency domain. DFC converts visually entangled and hard-to-describe degradation effects into a measurable degradation coordinate space. Moreover, DFC can be adaptively decomposed into band-wise spectral tokens, allowing local degradation responses to be represented as reusable restoration priors. Based on this representation, we develop the DFC-guided Image Restorer (DFC-IR), a token-conditioned multi-scale framework that progressively estimates DFCs from intermediate restorations and uses the resulting spectral tokens to guide degradation-aware restoration in a coarse-to-fine manner. Extensive experiments on standard, composite, unseen, and real-world degradation benchmarks show that DFC provides an effective representation basis for all-in-one restoration, leading to state-of-the-art performance and improved generalization under complex degradation profiles.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_17506
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Degradation Frequency Curve: An Explicit Frequency-Quantified Representation for All-in-One Image Restoration
Huang, Xinghua
Yang, Zhixiong
Wu, Chen
Li, Shengxi
Zhi, Shuaifeng
Zhang, Yue
Hou, Qibin
Deng, Xin
Xia, Jingyuan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
A fundamental difficulty in all-in-one blind image restoration is that degradation is usually treated as an implicit factor hidden in degraded-to-clean mapping, rather than as an explicit object that can be measured and manipulated. This limitation becomes more pronounced under mixed, compound, or unseen degradation conditions, where degradation effects are hard to assign to predefined labels or task-specific parameters. We propose the Degradation Frequency Curve (DFC), a structured spectral representation that quantifies degradation responses by measuring band-wise residual-to-degraded energy ratios in the frequency domain. DFC converts visually entangled and hard-to-describe degradation effects into a measurable degradation coordinate space. Moreover, DFC can be adaptively decomposed into band-wise spectral tokens, allowing local degradation responses to be represented as reusable restoration priors. Based on this representation, we develop the DFC-guided Image Restorer (DFC-IR), a token-conditioned multi-scale framework that progressively estimates DFCs from intermediate restorations and uses the resulting spectral tokens to guide degradation-aware restoration in a coarse-to-fine manner. Extensive experiments on standard, composite, unseen, and real-world degradation benchmarks show that DFC provides an effective representation basis for all-in-one restoration, leading to state-of-the-art performance and improved generalization under complex degradation profiles.
title Degradation Frequency Curve: An Explicit Frequency-Quantified Representation for All-in-One Image Restoration
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17506