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Feb 6

Clear Nights Ahead: Towards Multi-Weather Nighttime Image Restoration

Restoring nighttime images affected by multiple adverse weather conditions is a practical yet under-explored research problem, as multiple weather conditions often coexist in the real world alongside various lighting effects at night. This paper first explores the challenging multi-weather nighttime image restoration task, where various types of weather degradations are intertwined with flare effects. To support the research, we contribute the AllWeatherNight dataset, featuring large-scale high-quality nighttime images with diverse compositional degradations, synthesized using our introduced illumination-aware degradation generation. Moreover, we present ClearNight, a unified nighttime image restoration framework, which effectively removes complex degradations in one go. Specifically, ClearNight extracts Retinex-based dual priors and explicitly guides the network to focus on uneven illumination regions and intrinsic texture contents respectively, thereby enhancing restoration effectiveness in nighttime scenarios. In order to better represent the common and unique characters of multiple weather degradations, we introduce a weather-aware dynamic specific-commonality collaboration method, which identifies weather degradations and adaptively selects optimal candidate units associated with specific weather types. Our ClearNight achieves state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and real-world images. Comprehensive ablation experiments validate the necessity of AllWeatherNight dataset as well as the effectiveness of ClearNight. Project page: https://henlyta.github.io/ClearNight/mainpage.html

  • 5 authors
·
May 22, 2025 2

RestoreX-AI: A Contrastive Approach towards Guiding Image Restoration via Explainable AI Systems

Modern applications such as self-driving cars and drones rely heavily upon robust object detection techniques. However, weather corruptions can hinder the object detectability and pose a serious threat to their navigation and reliability. Thus, there is a need for efficient denoising, deraining, and restoration techniques. Generative adversarial networks and transformers have been widely adopted for image restoration. However, the training of these methods is often unstable and time-consuming. Furthermore, when used for object detection (OD), the output images generated by these methods may provide unsatisfactory results despite image clarity. In this work, we propose a contrastive approach towards mitigating this problem, by evaluating images generated by restoration models during and post training. This approach leverages OD scores combined with attention maps for predicting the usefulness of restored images for the OD task. We conduct experiments using two novel use-cases of conditional GANs and two transformer methods that probe the robustness of the proposed approach on multi-weather corruptions in the OD task. Our approach achieves an averaged 178 percent increase in mAP between the input and restored images under adverse weather conditions like dust tornadoes and snowfall. We report unique cases where greater denoising does not improve OD performance and conversely where noisy generated images demonstrate good results. We conclude the need for explainability frameworks to bridge the gap between human and machine perception, especially in the context of robust object detection for autonomous vehicles.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 3, 2022

TANet: Triplet Attention Network for All-In-One Adverse Weather Image Restoration

Adverse weather image restoration aims to remove unwanted degraded artifacts, such as haze, rain, and snow, caused by adverse weather conditions. Existing methods achieve remarkable results for addressing single-weather conditions. However, they face challenges when encountering unpredictable weather conditions, which often happen in real-world scenarios. Although different weather conditions exhibit different degradation patterns, they share common characteristics that are highly related and complementary, such as occlusions caused by degradation patterns, color distortion, and contrast attenuation due to the scattering of atmospheric particles. Therefore, we focus on leveraging common knowledge across multiple weather conditions to restore images in a unified manner. In this paper, we propose a Triplet Attention Network (TANet) to efficiently and effectively address all-in-one adverse weather image restoration. TANet consists of Triplet Attention Block (TAB) that incorporates three types of attention mechanisms: Local Pixel-wise Attention (LPA) and Global Strip-wise Attention (GSA) to address occlusions caused by non-uniform degradation patterns, and Global Distribution Attention (GDA) to address color distortion and contrast attenuation caused by atmospheric phenomena. By leveraging common knowledge shared across different weather conditions, TANet successfully addresses multiple weather conditions in a unified manner. Experimental results show that TANet efficiently and effectively achieves state-of-the-art performance in all-in-one adverse weather image restoration. The source code is available at https://github.com/xhuachris/TANet-ACCV-2024.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 10, 2024

WeatherEdit: Controllable Weather Editing with 4D Gaussian Field

In this work, we present WeatherEdit, a novel weather editing pipeline for generating realistic weather effects with controllable types and severity in 3D scenes. Our approach is structured into two key components: weather background editing and weather particle construction. For weather background editing, we introduce an all-in-one adapter that integrates multiple weather styles into a single pretrained diffusion model, enabling the generation of diverse weather effects in 2D image backgrounds. During inference, we design a Temporal-View (TV-) attention mechanism that follows a specific order to aggregate temporal and spatial information, ensuring consistent editing across multi-frame and multi-view images. To construct the weather particles, we first reconstruct a 3D scene using the edited images and then introduce a dynamic 4D Gaussian field to generate snowflakes, raindrops and fog in the scene. The attributes and dynamics of these particles are precisely controlled through physical-based modelling and simulation, ensuring realistic weather representation and flexible severity adjustments. Finally, we integrate the 4D Gaussian field with the 3D scene to render consistent and highly realistic weather effects. Experiments on multiple driving datasets demonstrate that WeatherEdit can generate diverse weather effects with controllable condition severity, highlighting its potential for autonomous driving simulation in adverse weather. See project page: https://jumponthemoon.github.io/w-edit

  • 4 authors
·
May 26, 2025

Pruning Overparameterized Multi-Task Networks for Degraded Web Image Restoration

Image quality is a critical factor in delivering visually appealing content on web platforms. However, images often suffer from degradation due to lossy operations applied by online social networks (OSNs), negatively affecting user experience. Image restoration is the process of recovering a clean high-quality image from a given degraded input. Recently, multi-task (all-in-one) image restoration models have gained significant attention, due to their ability to simultaneously handle different types of image degradations. However, these models often come with an excessively high number of trainable parameters, making them computationally inefficient. In this paper, we propose a strategy for compressing multi-task image restoration models. We aim to discover highly sparse subnetworks within overparameterized deep models that can match or even surpass the performance of their dense counterparts. The proposed model, namely MIR-L, utilizes an iterative pruning strategy that removes low-magnitude weights across multiple rounds, while resetting the remaining weights to their original initialization. This iterative process is important for the multi-task image restoration model's optimization, effectively uncovering "winning tickets" that maintain or exceed state-of-the-art performance at high sparsity levels. Experimental evaluation on benchmark datasets for the deraining, dehazing, and denoising tasks shows that MIR-L retains only 10% of the trainable parameters while maintaining high image restoration performance. Our code, datasets and pre-trained models are made publicly available at https://github.com/Thomkat/MIR-L.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 16, 2025 2

Video Adverse-Weather-Component Suppression Network via Weather Messenger and Adversarial Backpropagation

Although convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been proposed to remove adverse weather conditions in single images using a single set of pre-trained weights, they fail to restore weather videos due to the absence of temporal information. Furthermore, existing methods for removing adverse weather conditions (e.g., rain, fog, and snow) from videos can only handle one type of adverse weather. In this work, we propose the first framework for restoring videos from all adverse weather conditions by developing a video adverse-weather-component suppression network (ViWS-Net). To achieve this, we first devise a weather-agnostic video transformer encoder with multiple transformer stages. Moreover, we design a long short-term temporal modeling mechanism for weather messenger to early fuse input adjacent video frames and learn weather-specific information. We further introduce a weather discriminator with gradient reversion, to maintain the weather-invariant common information and suppress the weather-specific information in pixel features, by adversarially predicting weather types. Finally, we develop a messenger-driven video transformer decoder to retrieve the residual weather-specific feature, which is spatiotemporally aggregated with hierarchical pixel features and refined to predict the clean target frame of input videos. Experimental results, on benchmark datasets and real-world weather videos, demonstrate that our ViWS-Net outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in terms of restoring videos degraded by any weather condition.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 24, 2023

WeatherGS: 3D Scene Reconstruction in Adverse Weather Conditions via Gaussian Splatting

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has gained significant attention for 3D scene reconstruction, but still suffers from complex outdoor environments, especially under adverse weather. This is because 3DGS treats the artifacts caused by adverse weather as part of the scene and will directly reconstruct them, largely reducing the clarity of the reconstructed scene. To address this challenge, we propose WeatherGS, a 3DGS-based framework for reconstructing clear scenes from multi-view images under different weather conditions. Specifically, we explicitly categorize the multi-weather artifacts into the dense particles and lens occlusions that have very different characters, in which the former are caused by snowflakes and raindrops in the air, and the latter are raised by the precipitation on the camera lens. In light of this, we propose a dense-to-sparse preprocess strategy, which sequentially removes the dense particles by an Atmospheric Effect Filter (AEF) and then extracts the relatively sparse occlusion masks with a Lens Effect Detector (LED). Finally, we train a set of 3D Gaussians by the processed images and generated masks for excluding occluded areas, and accurately recover the underlying clear scene by Gaussian splatting. We conduct a diverse and challenging benchmark to facilitate the evaluation of 3D reconstruction under complex weather scenarios. Extensive experiments on this benchmark demonstrate that our WeatherGS consistently produces high-quality, clean scenes across various weather scenarios, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods. See project page:https://jumponthemoon.github.io/weather-gs.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 25, 2024 1

Multi-fidelity climate model parameterization for better generalization and extrapolation

Machine-learning-based parameterizations (i.e. representation of sub-grid processes) of global climate models or turbulent simulations have recently been proposed as a powerful alternative to physical, but empirical, representations, offering a lower computational cost and higher accuracy. Yet, those approaches still suffer from a lack of generalization and extrapolation beyond the training data, which is however critical to projecting climate change or unobserved regimes of turbulence. Here we show that a multi-fidelity approach, which integrates datasets of different accuracy and abundance, can provide the best of both worlds: the capacity to extrapolate leveraging the physically-based parameterization and a higher accuracy using the machine-learning-based parameterizations. In an application to climate modeling, the multi-fidelity framework yields more accurate climate projections without requiring major increase in computational resources. Our multi-fidelity randomized prior networks (MF-RPNs) combine physical parameterization data as low-fidelity and storm-resolving historical run's data as high-fidelity. To extrapolate beyond the training data, the MF-RPNs are tested on high-fidelity warming scenarios, +4K, data. We show the MF-RPN's capacity to return much more skillful predictions compared to either low- or high-fidelity (historical data) simulations trained only on one regime while providing trustworthy uncertainty quantification across a wide range of scenarios. Our approach paves the way for the use of machine-learning based methods that can optimally leverage historical observations or high-fidelity simulations and extrapolate to unseen regimes such as climate change.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 18, 2023

ScatterNeRF: Seeing Through Fog with Physically-Based Inverse Neural Rendering

Vision in adverse weather conditions, whether it be snow, rain, or fog is challenging. In these scenarios, scattering and attenuation severly degrades image quality. Handling such inclement weather conditions, however, is essential to operate autonomous vehicles, drones and robotic applications where human performance is impeded the most. A large body of work explores removing weather-induced image degradations with dehazing methods. Most methods rely on single images as input and struggle to generalize from synthetic fully-supervised training approaches or to generate high fidelity results from unpaired real-world datasets. With data as bottleneck and most of today's training data relying on good weather conditions with inclement weather as outlier, we rely on an inverse rendering approach to reconstruct the scene content. We introduce ScatterNeRF, a neural rendering method which adequately renders foggy scenes and decomposes the fog-free background from the participating media-exploiting the multiple views from a short automotive sequence without the need for a large training data corpus. Instead, the rendering approach is optimized on the multi-view scene itself, which can be typically captured by an autonomous vehicle, robot or drone during operation. Specifically, we propose a disentangled representation for the scattering volume and the scene objects, and learn the scene reconstruction with physics-inspired losses. We validate our method by capturing multi-view In-the-Wild data and controlled captures in a large-scale fog chamber.

  • 6 authors
·
May 3, 2023

A Survey on All-in-One Image Restoration: Taxonomy, Evaluation and Future Trends

Image restoration (IR) seeks to recover high-quality images from degraded observations caused by a wide range of factors, including noise, blur, compression, and adverse weather. While traditional IR methods have made notable progress by targeting individual degradation types, their specialization often comes at the cost of generalization, leaving them ill-equipped to handle the multifaceted distortions encountered in real-world applications. In response to this challenge, the all-in-one image restoration (AiOIR) paradigm has recently emerged, offering a unified framework that adeptly addresses multiple degradation types. These innovative models enhance the convenience and versatility by adaptively learning degradation-specific features while simultaneously leveraging shared knowledge across diverse corruptions. In this survey, we provide the first in-depth and systematic overview of AiOIR, delivering a structured taxonomy that categorizes existing methods by architectural designs, learning paradigms, and their core innovations. We systematically categorize current approaches and assess the challenges these models encounter, outlining research directions to propel this rapidly evolving field. To facilitate the evaluation of existing methods, we also consolidate widely-used datasets, evaluation protocols, and implementation practices, and compare and summarize the most advanced open-source models. As the first comprehensive review dedicated to AiOIR, this paper aims to map the conceptual landscape, synthesize prevailing techniques, and ignite further exploration toward more intelligent, unified, and adaptable visual restoration systems. A curated code repository is available at https://github.com/Harbinzzy/All-in-One-Image-Restoration-Survey.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 19, 2024

WeatherQA: Can Multimodal Language Models Reason about Severe Weather?

Severe convective weather events, such as hail, tornadoes, and thunderstorms, often occur quickly yet cause significant damage, costing billions of dollars every year. This highlights the importance of forecasting severe weather threats hours in advance to better prepare meteorologists and residents in at-risk areas. Can modern large foundation models perform such forecasting? Existing weather benchmarks typically focus only on predicting time-series changes in certain weather parameters (e.g., temperature, moisture) with text-only features. In this work, we introduce WeatherQA, the first multimodal dataset designed for machines to reason about complex combinations of weather parameters (a.k.a., ingredients) and predict severe weather in real-world scenarios. The dataset includes over 8,000 (multi-images, text) pairs for diverse severe weather events. Each pair contains rich information crucial for forecasting -- the images describe the ingredients capturing environmental instability, surface observations, and radar reflectivity, and the text contains forecast analyses written by human experts. With WeatherQA, we evaluate state-of-the-art vision language models, including GPT4, Claude3.5, Gemini-1.5, and a fine-tuned Llama3-based VLM, by designing two challenging tasks: (1) multi-choice QA for predicting affected area and (2) classification of the development potential of severe convection. These tasks require deep understanding of domain knowledge (e.g., atmospheric dynamics) and complex reasoning over multimodal data (e.g., interactions between weather parameters). We show a substantial gap between the strongest VLM, GPT4o, and human reasoning. Our comprehensive case study with meteorologists further reveals the weaknesses of the models, suggesting that better training and data integration are necessary to bridge this gap. WeatherQA link: https://github.com/chengqianma/WeatherQA.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 17, 2024

AllWeatherNet:Unified Image Enhancement for Autonomous Driving under Adverse Weather and Lowlight-conditions

Adverse conditions like snow, rain, nighttime, and fog, pose challenges for autonomous driving perception systems. Existing methods have limited effectiveness in improving essential computer vision tasks, such as semantic segmentation, and often focus on only one specific condition, such as removing rain or translating nighttime images into daytime ones. To address these limitations, we propose a method to improve the visual quality and clarity degraded by such adverse conditions. Our method, AllWeather-Net, utilizes a novel hierarchical architecture to enhance images across all adverse conditions. This architecture incorporates information at three semantic levels: scene, object, and texture, by discriminating patches at each level. Furthermore, we introduce a Scaled Illumination-aware Attention Mechanism (SIAM) that guides the learning towards road elements critical for autonomous driving perception. SIAM exhibits robustness, remaining unaffected by changes in weather conditions or environmental scenes. AllWeather-Net effectively transforms images into normal weather and daytime scenes, demonstrating superior image enhancement results and subsequently enhancing the performance of semantic segmentation, with up to a 5.3% improvement in mIoU in the trained domain. We also show our model's generalization ability by applying it to unseen domains without re-training, achieving up to 3.9% mIoU improvement. Code can be accessed at: https://github.com/Jumponthemoon/AllWeatherNet.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 3, 2024

Restoring Images in Adverse Weather Conditions via Histogram Transformer

Transformer-based image restoration methods in adverse weather have achieved significant progress. Most of them use self-attention along the channel dimension or within spatially fixed-range blocks to reduce computational load. However, such a compromise results in limitations in capturing long-range spatial features. Inspired by the observation that the weather-induced degradation factors mainly cause similar occlusion and brightness, in this work, we propose an efficient Histogram Transformer (Histoformer) for restoring images affected by adverse weather. It is powered by a mechanism dubbed histogram self-attention, which sorts and segments spatial features into intensity-based bins. Self-attention is then applied across bins or within each bin to selectively focus on spatial features of dynamic range and process similar degraded pixels of the long range together. To boost histogram self-attention, we present a dynamic-range convolution enabling conventional convolution to conduct operation over similar pixels rather than neighbor pixels. We also observe that the common pixel-wise losses neglect linear association and correlation between output and ground-truth. Thus, we propose to leverage the Pearson correlation coefficient as a loss function to enforce the recovered pixels following the identical order as ground-truth. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy and superiority of our proposed method. We have released the codes in Github.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 14, 2024

Kilometer-Scale Convection Allowing Model Emulation using Generative Diffusion Modeling

Storm-scale convection-allowing models (CAMs) are an important tool for predicting the evolution of thunderstorms and mesoscale convective systems that result in damaging extreme weather. By explicitly resolving convective dynamics within the atmosphere they afford meteorologists the nuance needed to provide outlook on hazard. Deep learning models have thus far not proven skilful at km-scale atmospheric simulation, despite being competitive at coarser resolution with state-of-the-art global, medium-range weather forecasting. We present a generative diffusion model called StormCast, which emulates the high-resolution rapid refresh (HRRR) model-NOAA's state-of-the-art 3km operational CAM. StormCast autoregressively predicts 99 state variables at km scale using a 1-hour time step, with dense vertical resolution in the atmospheric boundary layer, conditioned on 26 synoptic variables. We present evidence of successfully learnt km-scale dynamics including competitive 1-6 hour forecast skill for composite radar reflectivity alongside physically realistic convective cluster evolution, moist updrafts, and cold pool morphology. StormCast predictions maintain realistic power spectra for multiple predicted variables across multi-hour forecasts. Together, these results establish the potential for autoregressive ML to emulate CAMs -- opening up new km-scale frontiers for regional ML weather prediction and future climate hazard dynamical downscaling.

  • 11 authors
·
Aug 20, 2024

From Posterior Sampling to Meaningful Diversity in Image Restoration

Image restoration problems are typically ill-posed in the sense that each degraded image can be restored in infinitely many valid ways. To accommodate this, many works generate a diverse set of outputs by attempting to randomly sample from the posterior distribution of natural images given the degraded input. Here we argue that this strategy is commonly of limited practical value because of the heavy tail of the posterior distribution. Consider for example inpainting a missing region of the sky in an image. Since there is a high probability that the missing region contains no object but clouds, any set of samples from the posterior would be entirely dominated by (practically identical) completions of sky. However, arguably, presenting users with only one clear sky completion, along with several alternative solutions such as airships, birds, and balloons, would better outline the set of possibilities. In this paper, we initiate the study of meaningfully diverse image restoration. We explore several post-processing approaches that can be combined with any diverse image restoration method to yield semantically meaningful diversity. Moreover, we propose a practical approach for allowing diffusion based image restoration methods to generate meaningfully diverse outputs, while incurring only negligent computational overhead. We conduct extensive user studies to analyze the proposed techniques, and find the strategy of reducing similarity between outputs to be significantly favorable over posterior sampling. Code and examples are available at https://noa-cohen.github.io/MeaningfulDiversityInIR.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 24, 2023

MVInverse: Feed-forward Multi-view Inverse Rendering in Seconds

Multi-view inverse rendering aims to recover geometry, materials, and illumination consistently across multiple viewpoints. When applied to multi-view images, existing single-view approaches often ignore cross-view relationships, leading to inconsistent results. In contrast, multi-view optimization methods rely on slow differentiable rendering and per-scene refinement, making them computationally expensive and hard to scale. To address these limitations, we introduce a feed-forward multi-view inverse rendering framework that directly predicts spatially varying albedo, metallic, roughness, diffuse shading, and surface normals from sequences of RGB images. By alternating attention across views, our model captures both intra-view long-range lighting interactions and inter-view material consistency, enabling coherent scene-level reasoning within a single forward pass. Due to the scarcity of real-world training data, models trained on existing synthetic datasets often struggle to generalize to real-world scenes. To overcome this limitation, we propose a consistency-based finetuning strategy that leverages unlabeled real-world videos to enhance both multi-view coherence and robustness under in-the-wild conditions. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of multi-view consistency, material and normal estimation quality, and generalization to real-world imagery.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 24, 2025

Met^2Net: A Decoupled Two-Stage Spatio-Temporal Forecasting Model for Complex Meteorological Systems

The increasing frequency of extreme weather events due to global climate change urges accurate weather prediction. Recently, great advances have been made by the end-to-end methods, thanks to deep learning techniques, but they face limitations of representation inconsistency in multivariable integration and struggle to effectively capture the dependency between variables, which is required in complex weather systems. Treating different variables as distinct modalities and applying a two-stage training approach from multimodal models can partially alleviate this issue, but due to the inconformity in training tasks between the two stages, the results are often suboptimal. To address these challenges, we propose an implicit two-stage training method, configuring separate encoders and decoders for each variable. In detailed, in the first stage, the Translator is frozen while the Encoders and Decoders learn a shared latent space, in the second stage, the Encoders and Decoders are frozen, and the Translator captures inter-variable interactions for prediction. Besides, by introducing a self-attention mechanism for multivariable fusion in the latent space, the performance achieves further improvements. Empirically, extensive experiments show the state-of-the-art performance of our method. Specifically, it reduces the MSE for near-surface air temperature and relative humidity predictions by 28.82\% and 23.39\%, respectively. The source code is available at https://github.com/ShremG/Met2Net.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 23, 2025 1

Machine Learning Parameterization of the Multi-scale Kain-Fritsch (MSKF) Convection Scheme

Warm-sector heavy rainfall often occurs along the coast of South China, and it is usually localized and long-lasting, making it challenging to predict. High-resolution numerical weather prediction (NWP) models are increasingly used to better resolve topographic features and forecast such high-impact weather events. However, when the grid spacing becomes comparable to the length scales of convection, known as the gray zone, the turbulent eddies in the atmospheric boundary layer are only partially resolved and parameterized to some extent. Whether using a convection parameterization (CP) scheme in the gray zone remains controversial. Scale-aware CP schemes are developed to enhance the representation of convective transport within the gray zone. The multi-scale Kain-Fritsch (MSKF) scheme includes modifications that allow for its effective implementation at a grid resolution as high as 2 km. In recent years, there has been an increasing application of machine learning (ML) models to various domains of atmospheric sciences, including the replacement of physical parameterizations with ML models. This work proposes a multi-output bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) model as a replace the scale-aware MSKF CP scheme. The Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model is used to generate training and testing data over South China at a horizontal resolution of 5 km. Furthermore, the WRF model is coupled with the ML based CP scheme and compared with WRF simulations with original MSKF scheme. The results demonstrate that the Bi-LSTM model can achieve high accuracy, indicating the potential use of ML models to substitute the MSKF scheme in the gray zone.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 6, 2023

Weather2K: A Multivariate Spatio-Temporal Benchmark Dataset for Meteorological Forecasting Based on Real-Time Observation Data from Ground Weather Stations

Weather forecasting is one of the cornerstones of meteorological work. In this paper, we present a new benchmark dataset named Weather2K, which aims to make up for the deficiencies of existing weather forecasting datasets in terms of real-time, reliability, and diversity, as well as the key bottleneck of data quality. To be specific, our Weather2K is featured from the following aspects: 1) Reliable and real-time data. The data is hourly collected from 2,130 ground weather stations covering an area of 6 million square kilometers. 2) Multivariate meteorological variables. 20 meteorological factors and 3 constants for position information are provided with a length of 40,896 time steps. 3) Applicable to diverse tasks. We conduct a set of baseline tests on time series forecasting and spatio-temporal forecasting. To the best of our knowledge, our Weather2K is the first attempt to tackle weather forecasting task by taking full advantage of the strengths of observation data from ground weather stations. Based on Weather2K, we further propose Meteorological Factors based Multi-Graph Convolution Network (MFMGCN), which can effectively construct the intrinsic correlation among geographic locations based on meteorological factors. Sufficient experiments show that MFMGCN improves both the forecasting performance and temporal robustness. We hope our Weather2K can significantly motivate researchers to develop efficient and accurate algorithms to advance the task of weather forecasting. The dataset can be available at https://github.com/bycnfz/weather2k/.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 21, 2023

MCW-Net: Single Image Deraining with Multi-level Connections and Wide Regional Non-local Blocks

A recent line of convolutional neural network-based works has succeeded in capturing rain streaks. However, difficulties in detailed recovery still remain. In this paper, we present a multi-level connection and wide regional non-local block network (MCW-Net) to properly restore the original background textures in rainy images. Unlike existing encoder-decoder-based image deraining models that improve performance with additional branches, MCW-Net improves performance by maximizing information utilization without additional branches through the following two proposed methods. The first method is a multi-level connection that repeatedly connects multi-level features of the encoder network to the decoder network. Multi-level connection encourages the decoding process to use the feature information of all levels. In multi-level connection, channel-wise attention is considered to learn which level of features is important in the decoding process of the current level. The second method is a wide regional non-local block. As rain streaks primarily exhibit a vertical distribution, we divide the grid of the image into horizontally-wide patches and apply a non-local operation to each region to explore the rich rain-free background information. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world rainy datasets demonstrate that the proposed model significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art models. Furthermore, the results of the joint deraining and segmentation experiment prove that our model contributes effectively to other vision tasks.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 29, 2020

Prithvi WxC: Foundation Model for Weather and Climate

Triggered by the realization that AI emulators can rival the performance of traditional numerical weather prediction models running on HPC systems, there is now an increasing number of large AI models that address use cases such as forecasting, downscaling, or nowcasting. While the parallel developments in the AI literature focus on foundation models -- models that can be effectively tuned to address multiple, different use cases -- the developments on the weather and climate side largely focus on single-use cases with particular emphasis on mid-range forecasting. We close this gap by introducing Prithvi WxC, a 2.3 billion parameter foundation model developed using 160 variables from the Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications, Version 2 (MERRA-2). Prithvi WxC employs an encoder-decoder-based architecture, incorporating concepts from various recent transformer models to effectively capture both regional and global dependencies in the input data. The model has been designed to accommodate large token counts to model weather phenomena in different topologies at fine resolutions. Furthermore, it is trained with a mixed objective that combines the paradigms of masked reconstruction with forecasting. We test the model on a set of challenging downstream tasks namely: Autoregressive rollout forecasting, Downscaling, Gravity wave flux parameterization, and Extreme events estimation. The pretrained model with 2.3 billion parameters, along with the associated fine-tuning workflows, has been publicly released as an open-source contribution via Hugging Face.

  • 29 authors
·
Sep 20, 2024 4

WonderFree: Enhancing Novel View Quality and Cross-View Consistency for 3D Scene Exploration

Interactive 3D scene generation from a single image has gained significant attention due to its potential to create immersive virtual worlds. However, a key challenge in current 3D generation methods is the limited explorability, which cannot render high-quality images during larger maneuvers beyond the original viewpoint, particularly when attempting to move forward into unseen areas. To address this challenge, we propose WonderFree, the first model that enables users to interactively generate 3D worlds with the freedom to explore from arbitrary angles and directions. Specifically, we decouple this challenge into two key subproblems: novel view quality, which addresses visual artifacts and floating issues in novel views, and cross-view consistency, which ensures spatial consistency across different viewpoints. To enhance rendering quality in novel views, we introduce WorldRestorer, a data-driven video restoration model designed to eliminate floaters and artifacts. In addition, a data collection pipeline is presented to automatically gather training data for WorldRestorer, ensuring it can handle scenes with varying styles needed for 3D scene generation. Furthermore, to improve cross-view consistency, we propose ConsistView, a multi-view joint restoration mechanism that simultaneously restores multiple perspectives while maintaining spatiotemporal coherence. Experimental results demonstrate that WonderFree not only enhances rendering quality across diverse viewpoints but also significantly improves global coherence and consistency. These improvements are confirmed by CLIP-based metrics and a user study showing a 77.20% preference for WonderFree over WonderWorld enabling a seamless and immersive 3D exploration experience. The code, model, and data will be publicly available.

  • 11 authors
·
Jun 25, 2025

From heavy rain removal to detail restoration: A faster and better network

The profound accumulation of precipitation during intense rainfall events can markedly degrade the quality of images, leading to the erosion of textural details. Despite the improvements observed in existing learning-based methods specialized for heavy rain removal, it is discerned that a significant proportion of these methods tend to overlook the precise reconstruction of the intricate details. In this work, we introduce a simple dual-stage progressive enhancement network, denoted as DPENet, aiming to achieve effective deraining while preserving the structural accuracy of rain-free images. This approach comprises two key modules, a rain streaks removal network (R^2Net) focusing on accurate rain removal, and a details reconstruction network (DRNet) designed to recover the textural details of rain-free images. Firstly, we introduce a dilated dense residual block (DDRB) within R^2Net, enabling the aggregation of high-level and low-level features. Secondly, an enhanced residual pixel-wise attention block (ERPAB) is integrated into DRNet to facilitate the incorporation of contextual information. To further enhance the fidelity of our approach, we employ a comprehensive loss function that accentuates both the marginal and regional accuracy of rain-free images. Extensive experiments conducted on publicly available benchmarks demonstrates the noteworthy efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed DPENet. The source code and pre-trained models are currently available at https://github.com/chdwyb/DPENet.

  • 5 authors
·
May 7, 2022

GenDeg: Diffusion-Based Degradation Synthesis for Generalizable All-in-One Image Restoration

Deep learning-based models for All-In-One Image Restoration (AIOR) have achieved significant advancements in recent years. However, their practical applicability is limited by poor generalization to samples outside the training distribution. This limitation arises primarily from insufficient diversity in degradation variations and scenes within existing datasets, resulting in inadequate representations of real-world scenarios. Additionally, capturing large-scale real-world paired data for degradations such as haze, low-light, and raindrops is often cumbersome and sometimes infeasible. In this paper, we leverage the generative capabilities of latent diffusion models to synthesize high-quality degraded images from their clean counterparts. Specifically, we introduce GenDeg, a degradation and intensity-aware conditional diffusion model capable of producing diverse degradation patterns on clean images. Using GenDeg, we synthesize over 550k samples across six degradation types: haze, rain, snow, motion blur, low-light, and raindrops. These generated samples are integrated with existing datasets to form the GenDS dataset, comprising over 750k samples. Our experiments reveal that image restoration models trained on the GenDS dataset exhibit significant improvements in out-of-distribution performance compared to those trained solely on existing datasets. Furthermore, we provide comprehensive analyses on the implications of diffusion model-based synthetic degradations for AIOR. The code will be made publicly available.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 26, 2024

Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation: Let's Talk About The Weather

Current, self-supervised depth estimation architectures rely on clear and sunny weather scenes to train deep neural networks. However, in many locations, this assumption is too strong. For example in the UK (2021), 149 days consisted of rain. For these architectures to be effective in real-world applications, we must create models that can generalise to all weather conditions, times of the day and image qualities. Using a combination of computer graphics and generative models, one can augment existing sunny-weather data in a variety of ways that simulate adverse weather effects. While it is tempting to use such data augmentations for self-supervised depth, in the past this was shown to degrade performance instead of improving it. In this paper, we put forward a method that uses augmentations to remedy this problem. By exploiting the correspondence between unaugmented and augmented data we introduce a pseudo-supervised loss for both depth and pose estimation. This brings back some of the benefits of supervised learning while still not requiring any labels. We also make a series of practical recommendations which collectively offer a reliable, efficient framework for weather-related augmentation of self-supervised depth from monocular video. We present extensive testing to show that our method, Robust-Depth, achieves SotA performance on the KITTI dataset while significantly surpassing SotA on challenging, adverse condition data such as DrivingStereo, Foggy CityScape and NuScenes-Night. The project website can be found here https://kieran514.github.io/Robust-Depth-Project/.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 17, 2023

StyledStreets: Multi-style Street Simulator with Spatial and Temporal Consistency

Urban scene reconstruction requires modeling both static infrastructure and dynamic elements while supporting diverse environmental conditions. We present StyledStreets, a multi-style street simulator that achieves instruction-driven scene editing with guaranteed spatial and temporal consistency. Building on a state-of-the-art Gaussian Splatting framework for street scenarios enhanced by our proposed pose optimization and multi-view training, our method enables photorealistic style transfers across seasons, weather conditions, and camera setups through three key innovations: First, a hybrid embedding scheme disentangles persistent scene geometry from transient style attributes, allowing realistic environmental edits while preserving structural integrity. Second, uncertainty-aware rendering mitigates supervision noise from diffusion priors, enabling robust training across extreme style variations. Third, a unified parametric model prevents geometric drift through regularized updates, maintaining multi-view consistency across seven vehicle-mounted cameras. Our framework preserves the original scene's motion patterns and geometric relationships. Qualitative results demonstrate plausible transitions between diverse conditions (snow, sandstorm, night), while quantitative evaluations show state-of-the-art geometric accuracy under style transfers. The approach establishes new capabilities for urban simulation, with applications in autonomous vehicle testing and augmented reality systems requiring reliable environmental consistency. Codes will be publicly available upon publication.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 26, 2025

DisasterM3: A Remote Sensing Vision-Language Dataset for Disaster Damage Assessment and Response

Large vision-language models (VLMs) have made great achievements in Earth vision. However, complex disaster scenes with diverse disaster types, geographic regions, and satellite sensors have posed new challenges for VLM applications. To fill this gap, we curate a remote sensing vision-language dataset (DisasterM3) for global-scale disaster assessment and response. DisasterM3 includes 26,988 bi-temporal satellite images and 123k instruction pairs across 5 continents, with three characteristics: 1) Multi-hazard: DisasterM3 involves 36 historical disaster events with significant impacts, which are categorized into 10 common natural and man-made disasters. 2)Multi-sensor: Extreme weather during disasters often hinders optical sensor imaging, making it necessary to combine Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery for post-disaster scenes. 3) Multi-task: Based on real-world scenarios, DisasterM3 includes 9 disaster-related visual perception and reasoning tasks, harnessing the full potential of VLM's reasoning ability with progressing from disaster-bearing body recognition to structural damage assessment and object relational reasoning, culminating in the generation of long-form disaster reports. We extensively evaluated 14 generic and remote sensing VLMs on our benchmark, revealing that state-of-the-art models struggle with the disaster tasks, largely due to the lack of a disaster-specific corpus, cross-sensor gap, and damage object counting insensitivity. Focusing on these issues, we fine-tune four VLMs using our dataset and achieve stable improvements across all tasks, with robust cross-sensor and cross-disaster generalization capabilities.

  • 11 authors
·
May 27, 2025

BRIGHT: A globally distributed multimodal building damage assessment dataset with very-high-resolution for all-weather disaster response

Disaster events occur around the world and cause significant damage to human life and property. Earth observation (EO) data enables rapid and comprehensive building damage assessment (BDA), an essential capability in the aftermath of a disaster to reduce human casualties and to inform disaster relief efforts. Recent research focuses on the development of AI models to achieve accurate mapping of unseen disaster events, mostly using optical EO data. However, solutions based on optical data are limited to clear skies and daylight hours, preventing a prompt response to disasters. Integrating multimodal (MM) EO data, particularly the combination of optical and SAR imagery, makes it possible to provide all-weather, day-and-night disaster responses. Despite this potential, the development of robust multimodal AI models has been constrained by the lack of suitable benchmark datasets. In this paper, we present a BDA dataset using veRy-hIGH-resoluTion optical and SAR imagery (BRIGHT) to support AI-based all-weather disaster response. To the best of our knowledge, BRIGHT is the first open-access, globally distributed, event-diverse MM dataset specifically curated to support AI-based disaster response. It covers five types of natural disasters and two types of man-made disasters across 12 regions worldwide, with a particular focus on developing countries where external assistance is most needed. The optical and SAR imagery in BRIGHT, with a spatial resolution between 0.3-1 meters, provides detailed representations of individual buildings, making it ideal for precise BDA. In our experiments, we have tested seven advanced AI models trained with our BRIGHT to validate the transferability and robustness. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/ChenHongruixuan/BRIGHT. BRIGHT also serves as the official dataset for the 2025 IEEE GRSS Data Fusion Contest.

  • 12 authors
·
Jan 10, 2025

Location-aware Adaptive Normalization: A Deep Learning Approach For Wildfire Danger Forecasting

Climate change is expected to intensify and increase extreme events in the weather cycle. Since this has a significant impact on various sectors of our life, recent works are concerned with identifying and predicting such extreme events from Earth observations. With respect to wildfire danger forecasting, previous deep learning approaches duplicate static variables along the time dimension and neglect the intrinsic differences between static and dynamic variables. Furthermore, most existing multi-branch architectures lose the interconnections between the branches during the feature learning stage. To address these issues, this paper proposes a 2D/3D two-branch convolutional neural network (CNN) with a Location-aware Adaptive Normalization layer (LOAN). Using LOAN as a building block, we can modulate the dynamic features conditional on their geographical locations. Thus, our approach considers feature properties as a unified yet compound 2D/3D model. Besides, we propose using the sinusoidal-based encoding of the day of the year to provide the model with explicit temporal information about the target day within the year. Our experimental results show a better performance of our approach than other baselines on the challenging FireCube dataset. The results show that location-aware adaptive feature normalization is a promising technique to learn the relation between dynamic variables and their geographic locations, which is highly relevant for areas where remote sensing data builds the basis for analysis. The source code is available at https://github.com/HakamShams/LOAN.

UniBonn Univerity of Bonn
·
Dec 15, 2022

ClimateLearn: Benchmarking Machine Learning for Weather and Climate Modeling

Modeling weather and climate is an essential endeavor to understand the near- and long-term impacts of climate change, as well as inform technology and policymaking for adaptation and mitigation efforts. In recent years, there has been a surging interest in applying data-driven methods based on machine learning for solving core problems such as weather forecasting and climate downscaling. Despite promising results, much of this progress has been impaired due to the lack of large-scale, open-source efforts for reproducibility, resulting in the use of inconsistent or underspecified datasets, training setups, and evaluations by both domain scientists and artificial intelligence researchers. We introduce ClimateLearn, an open-source PyTorch library that vastly simplifies the training and evaluation of machine learning models for data-driven climate science. ClimateLearn consists of holistic pipelines for dataset processing (e.g., ERA5, CMIP6, PRISM), implementation of state-of-the-art deep learning models (e.g., Transformers, ResNets), and quantitative and qualitative evaluation for standard weather and climate modeling tasks. We supplement these functionalities with extensive documentation, contribution guides, and quickstart tutorials to expand access and promote community growth. We have also performed comprehensive forecasting and downscaling experiments to showcase the capabilities and key features of our library. To our knowledge, ClimateLearn is the first large-scale, open-source effort for bridging research in weather and climate modeling with modern machine learning systems. Our library is available publicly at https://github.com/aditya-grover/climate-learn.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 4, 2023

UniTS: Unified Time Series Generative Model for Remote Sensing

One of the primary objectives of satellite remote sensing is to capture the complex dynamics of the Earth environment, which encompasses tasks such as reconstructing continuous cloud-free time series images, detecting land cover changes, and forecasting future surface evolution. However, existing methods typically require specialized models tailored to different tasks, lacking unified modeling of spatiotemporal features across multiple time series tasks. In this paper, we propose a Unified Time Series Generative Model (UniTS), a general framework applicable to various time series tasks, including time series reconstruction, time series cloud removal, time series semantic change detection, and time series forecasting. Based on the flow matching generative paradigm, UniTS constructs a deterministic evolution path from noise to targets under the guidance of task-specific conditions, achieving unified modeling of spatiotemporal representations for multiple tasks. The UniTS architecture consists of a diffusion transformer with spatio-temporal blocks, where we design an Adaptive Condition Injector (ACor) to enhance the model's conditional perception of multimodal inputs, enabling high-quality controllable generation. Additionally, we design a Spatiotemporal-aware Modulator (STM) to improve the ability of spatio-temporal blocks to capture complex spatiotemporal dependencies. Furthermore, we construct two high-quality multimodal time series datasets, TS-S12 and TS-S12CR, filling the gap of benchmark datasets for time series cloud removal and forecasting tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniTS exhibits exceptional generative and cognitive capabilities in both low-level and high-level time series tasks. It significantly outperforms existing methods, particularly when facing challenges such as severe cloud contamination, modality absence, and forecasting phenological variations.

  • 11 authors
·
Dec 4, 2025

RestoreFormer++: Towards Real-World Blind Face Restoration from Undegraded Key-Value Pairs

Blind face restoration aims at recovering high-quality face images from those with unknown degradations. Current algorithms mainly introduce priors to complement high-quality details and achieve impressive progress. However, most of these algorithms ignore abundant contextual information in the face and its interplay with the priors, leading to sub-optimal performance. Moreover, they pay less attention to the gap between the synthetic and real-world scenarios, limiting the robustness and generalization to real-world applications. In this work, we propose RestoreFormer++, which on the one hand introduces fully-spatial attention mechanisms to model the contextual information and the interplay with the priors, and on the other hand, explores an extending degrading model to help generate more realistic degraded face images to alleviate the synthetic-to-real-world gap. Compared with current algorithms, RestoreFormer++ has several crucial benefits. First, instead of using a multi-head self-attention mechanism like the traditional visual transformer, we introduce multi-head cross-attention over multi-scale features to fully explore spatial interactions between corrupted information and high-quality priors. In this way, it can facilitate RestoreFormer++ to restore face images with higher realness and fidelity. Second, in contrast to the recognition-oriented dictionary, we learn a reconstruction-oriented dictionary as priors, which contains more diverse high-quality facial details and better accords with the restoration target. Third, we introduce an extending degrading model that contains more realistic degraded scenarios for training data synthesizing, and thus helps to enhance the robustness and generalization of our RestoreFormer++ model. Extensive experiments show that RestoreFormer++ outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 14, 2023

AdaIR: Adaptive All-in-One Image Restoration via Frequency Mining and Modulation

In the image acquisition process, various forms of degradation, including noise, haze, and rain, are frequently introduced. These degradations typically arise from the inherent limitations of cameras or unfavorable ambient conditions. To recover clean images from degraded versions, numerous specialized restoration methods have been developed, each targeting a specific type of degradation. Recently, all-in-one algorithms have garnered significant attention by addressing different types of degradations within a single model without requiring prior information of the input degradation type. However, these methods purely operate in the spatial domain and do not delve into the distinct frequency variations inherent to different degradation types. To address this gap, we propose an adaptive all-in-one image restoration network based on frequency mining and modulation. Our approach is motivated by the observation that different degradation types impact the image content on different frequency subbands, thereby requiring different treatments for each restoration task. Specifically, we first mine low- and high-frequency information from the input features, guided by the adaptively decoupled spectra of the degraded image. The extracted features are then modulated by a bidirectional operator to facilitate interactions between different frequency components. Finally, the modulated features are merged into the original input for a progressively guided restoration. With this approach, the model achieves adaptive reconstruction by accentuating the informative frequency subbands according to different input degradations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on different image restoration tasks, including denoising, dehazing, deraining, motion deblurring, and low-light image enhancement. Our code is available at https://github.com/c-yn/AdaIR.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 21, 2024 2

RoofNet: A Global Multimodal Dataset for Roof Material Classification

Natural disasters are increasing in frequency and severity, causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage annually and posing growing threats to infrastructure and human livelihoods. Accurate data on roofing materials is critical for modeling building vulnerability to natural hazards such as earthquakes, floods, wildfires, and hurricanes, yet such data remain unavailable. To address this gap, we introduce RoofNet, the largest and most geographically diverse novel multimodal dataset to date, comprising over 51,500 samples from 184 geographically diverse sites pairing high-resolution Earth Observation (EO) imagery with curated text annotations for global roof material classification. RoofNet includes geographically diverse satellite imagery labeled with 14 key roofing types -- such as asphalt shingles, clay tiles, and metal sheets -- and is designed to enhance the fidelity of global exposure datasets through vision-language modeling (VLM). We sample EO tiles from climatically and architecturally distinct regions to construct a representative dataset. A subset of 6,000 images was annotated in collaboration with domain experts to fine-tune a VLM. We used geographic- and material-aware prompt tuning to enhance class separability. The fine-tuned model was then applied to the remaining EO tiles, with predictions refined through rule-based and human-in-the-loop verification. In addition to material labels, RoofNet provides rich metadata including roof shape, footprint area, solar panel presence, and indicators of mixed roofing materials (e.g., HVAC systems). RoofNet supports scalable, AI-driven risk assessment and serves as a downstream benchmark for evaluating model generalization across regions -- offering actionable insights for insurance underwriting, disaster preparedness, and infrastructure policy planning.

  • 2 authors
·
May 25, 2025

Downscaling Extreme Precipitation with Wasserstein Regularized Diffusion

Understanding the risks posed by extreme rainfall events requires analysis of precipitation fields with high resolution (to assess localized hazards) and extensive historical coverage (to capture sufficient examples of rare occurrences). Radar and mesonet networks provide precipitation fields at 1 km resolution but with limited historical and geographical coverage, while gauge-based records and reanalysis products cover decades of time on a global scale, but only at 30-50 km resolution. To help provide high-resolution precipitation estimates over long time scales, this study presents Wasserstein Regularized Diffusion (WassDiff), a diffusion framework to downscale (super-resolve) precipitation fields from low-resolution gauge and reanalysis products. Crucially, unlike related deep generative models, WassDiff integrates a Wasserstein distribution-matching regularizer to the denoising process to reduce empirical biases at extreme intensities. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that WassDiff quantitatively outperforms existing state-of-the-art generative downscaling methods at recovering extreme weather phenomena such as tropical storms and cold fronts. Case studies further qualitatively demonstrate WassDiff's ability to reproduce realistic fine-scale weather structures and accurate peak intensities. By unlocking decades of high-resolution rainfall information from globally available coarse records, WassDiff offers a practical pathway toward more accurate flood-risk assessments and climate-adaptation planning.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 1, 2024

DiffuMural: Restoring Dunhuang Murals with Multi-scale Diffusion

Large-scale pre-trained diffusion models have produced excellent results in the field of conditional image generation. However, restoration of ancient murals, as an important downstream task in this field, poses significant challenges to diffusion model-based restoration methods due to its large defective area and scarce training samples. Conditional restoration tasks are more concerned with whether the restored part meets the aesthetic standards of mural restoration in terms of overall style and seam detail, and such metrics for evaluating heuristic image complements are lacking in current research. We therefore propose DiffuMural, a combined Multi-scale convergence and Collaborative Diffusion mechanism with ControlNet and cyclic consistency loss to optimise the matching between the generated images and the conditional control. DiffuMural demonstrates outstanding capabilities in mural restoration, leveraging training data from 23 large-scale Dunhuang murals that exhibit consistent visual aesthetics. The model excels in restoring intricate details, achieving a coherent overall appearance, and addressing the unique challenges posed by incomplete murals lacking factual grounding. Our evaluation framework incorporates four key metrics to quantitatively assess incomplete murals: factual accuracy, textural detail, contextual semantics, and holistic visual coherence. Furthermore, we integrate humanistic value assessments to ensure the restored murals retain their cultural and artistic significance. Extensive experiments validate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches in both qualitative and quantitative metrics.

  • 9 authors
·
Apr 13, 2025 2

DreamClear: High-Capacity Real-World Image Restoration with Privacy-Safe Dataset Curation

Image restoration (IR) in real-world scenarios presents significant challenges due to the lack of high-capacity models and comprehensive datasets. To tackle these issues, we present a dual strategy: GenIR, an innovative data curation pipeline, and DreamClear, a cutting-edge Diffusion Transformer (DiT)-based image restoration model. GenIR, our pioneering contribution, is a dual-prompt learning pipeline that overcomes the limitations of existing datasets, which typically comprise only a few thousand images and thus offer limited generalizability for larger models. GenIR streamlines the process into three stages: image-text pair construction, dual-prompt based fine-tuning, and data generation & filtering. This approach circumvents the laborious data crawling process, ensuring copyright compliance and providing a cost-effective, privacy-safe solution for IR dataset construction. The result is a large-scale dataset of one million high-quality images. Our second contribution, DreamClear, is a DiT-based image restoration model. It utilizes the generative priors of text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models and the robust perceptual capabilities of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to achieve photorealistic restoration. To boost the model's adaptability to diverse real-world degradations, we introduce the Mixture of Adaptive Modulator (MoAM). It employs token-wise degradation priors to dynamically integrate various restoration experts, thereby expanding the range of degradations the model can address. Our exhaustive experiments confirm DreamClear's superior performance, underlining the efficacy of our dual strategy for real-world image restoration. Code and pre-trained models will be available at: https://github.com/shallowdream204/DreamClear.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 24, 2024 3

Hyperlocal disaster damage assessment using bi-temporal street-view imagery and pre-trained vision models

Street-view images offer unique advantages for disaster damage estimation as they capture impacts from a visual perspective and provide detailed, on-the-ground insights. Despite several investigations attempting to analyze street-view images for damage estimation, they mainly focus on post-disaster images. The potential of time-series street-view images remains underexplored. Pre-disaster images provide valuable benchmarks for accurate damage estimations at building and street levels. These images could aid annotators in objectively labeling post-disaster impacts, improving the reliability of labeled data sets for model training, and potentially enhancing the model performance in damage evaluation. The goal of this study is to estimate hyperlocal, on-the-ground disaster damages using bi-temporal street-view images and advanced pre-trained vision models. Street-view images before and after 2024 Hurricane Milton in Horseshoe Beach, Florida, were collected for experiments. The objectives are: (1) to assess the performance gains of incorporating pre-disaster street-view images as a no-damage category in fine-tuning pre-trained models, including Swin Transformer and ConvNeXt, for damage level classification; (2) to design and evaluate a dual-channel algorithm that reads pair-wise pre- and post-disaster street-view images for hyperlocal damage assessment. The results indicate that incorporating pre-disaster street-view images and employing a dual-channel processing framework can significantly enhance damage assessment accuracy. The accuracy improves from 66.14% with the Swin Transformer baseline to 77.11% with the dual-channel Feature-Fusion ConvNeXt model. This research enables rapid, operational damage assessments at hyperlocal spatial resolutions, providing valuable insights to support effective decision-making in disaster management and resilience planning.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 11, 2025

Climate-sensitive Urban Planning through Optimization of Tree Placements

Climate change is increasing the intensity and frequency of many extreme weather events, including heatwaves, which results in increased thermal discomfort and mortality rates. While global mitigation action is undoubtedly necessary, so is climate adaptation, e.g., through climate-sensitive urban planning. Among the most promising strategies is harnessing the benefits of urban trees in shading and cooling pedestrian-level environments. Our work investigates the challenge of optimal placement of such trees. Physical simulations can estimate the radiative and thermal impact of trees on human thermal comfort but induce high computational costs. This rules out optimization of tree placements over large areas and considering effects over longer time scales. Hence, we employ neural networks to simulate the point-wise mean radiant temperatures--a driving factor of outdoor human thermal comfort--across various time scales, spanning from daily variations to extended time scales of heatwave events and even decades. To optimize tree placements, we harness the innate local effect of trees within the iterated local search framework with tailored adaptations. We show the efficacy of our approach across a wide spectrum of study areas and time scales. We believe that our approach is a step towards empowering decision-makers, urban designers and planners to proactively and effectively assess the potential of urban trees to mitigate heat stress.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 9, 2023

OneForecast: A Universal Framework for Global and Regional Weather Forecasting

Accurate weather forecasts are important for disaster prevention, agricultural planning, etc. Traditional numerical weather prediction (NWP) methods offer physically interpretable high-accuracy predictions but are computationally expensive and fail to fully leverage rapidly growing historical data. In recent years, deep learning models have made significant progress in weather forecasting, but challenges remain, such as balancing global and regional high-resolution forecasts, excessive smoothing in extreme event predictions, and insufficient dynamic system modeling. To address these issues, this paper proposes a global-regional nested weather forecasting framework (OneForecast) based on graph neural networks. By combining a dynamic system perspective with multi-grid theory, we construct a multi-scale graph structure and densify the target region to capture local high-frequency features. We introduce an adaptive messaging mechanism, using dynamic gating units to deeply integrate node and edge features for more accurate extreme event forecasting. For high-resolution regional forecasts, we propose a neural nested grid method to mitigate boundary information loss. Experimental results show that OneForecast performs excellently across global to regional scales and short-term to long-term forecasts, especially in extreme event predictions. Codes link https://github.com/YuanGao-YG/OneForecast.

  • 14 authors
·
Feb 1, 2025

Scaling transformer neural networks for skillful and reliable medium-range weather forecasting

Weather forecasting is a fundamental problem for anticipating and mitigating the impacts of climate change. Recently, data-driven approaches for weather forecasting based on deep learning have shown great promise, achieving accuracies that are competitive with operational systems. However, those methods often employ complex, customized architectures without sufficient ablation analysis, making it difficult to understand what truly contributes to their success. Here we introduce Stormer, a simple transformer model that achieves state-of-the-art performance on weather forecasting with minimal changes to the standard transformer backbone. We identify the key components of Stormer through careful empirical analyses, including weather-specific embedding, randomized dynamics forecast, and pressure-weighted loss. At the core of Stormer is a randomized forecasting objective that trains the model to forecast the weather dynamics over varying time intervals. During inference, this allows us to produce multiple forecasts for a target lead time and combine them to obtain better forecast accuracy. On WeatherBench 2, Stormer performs competitively at short to medium-range forecasts and outperforms current methods beyond 7 days, while requiring orders-of-magnitude less training data and compute. Additionally, we demonstrate Stormer's favorable scaling properties, showing consistent improvements in forecast accuracy with increases in model size and training tokens. Code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/tung-nd/stormer.

  • 9 authors
·
Dec 6, 2023

Multi-dimensional Visual Prompt Enhanced Image Restoration via Mamba-Transformer Aggregation

Recent efforts on image restoration have focused on developing "all-in-one" models that can handle different degradation types and levels within single model. However, most of mainstream Transformer-based ones confronted with dilemma between model capabilities and computation burdens, since self-attention mechanism quadratically increase in computational complexity with respect to image size, and has inadequacies in capturing long-range dependencies. Most of Mamba-related ones solely scanned feature map in spatial dimension for global modeling, failing to fully utilize information in channel dimension. To address aforementioned problems, this paper has proposed to fully utilize complementary advantages from Mamba and Transformer without sacrificing computation efficiency. Specifically, the selective scanning mechanism of Mamba is employed to focus on spatial modeling, enabling capture long-range spatial dependencies under linear complexity. The self-attention mechanism of Transformer is applied to focus on channel modeling, avoiding high computation burdens that are in quadratic growth with image's spatial dimensions. Moreover, to enrich informative prompts for effective image restoration, multi-dimensional prompt learning modules are proposed to learn prompt-flows from multi-scale encoder/decoder layers, benefiting for revealing underlying characteristic of various degradations from both spatial and channel perspectives, therefore, enhancing the capabilities of "all-in-one" model to solve various restoration tasks. Extensive experiment results on several image restoration benchmark tasks such as image denoising, dehazing, and deraining, have demonstrated that the proposed method can achieve new state-of-the-art performance, compared with many popular mainstream methods. Related source codes and pre-trained parameters will be public on github https://github.com/12138-chr/MTAIR.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 20, 2024

Advancing Parsimonious Deep Learning Weather Prediction using the HEALPix Mesh

We present a parsimonious deep learning weather prediction model to forecast seven atmospheric variables with 3-h time resolution for up to one-year lead times on a 110-km global mesh using the Hierarchical Equal Area isoLatitude Pixelization (HEALPix). In comparison to state-of-the-art (SOTA) machine learning (ML) weather forecast models, such as Pangu-Weather and GraphCast, our DLWP-HPX model uses coarser resolution and far fewer prognostic variables. Yet, at one-week lead times, its skill is only about one day behind both SOTA ML forecast models and the SOTA numerical weather prediction model from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. We report several improvements in model design, including switching from the cubed sphere to the HEALPix mesh, inverting the channel depth of the U-Net, and introducing gated recurrent units (GRU) on each level of the U-Net hierarchy. The consistent east-west orientation of all cells on the HEALPix mesh facilitates the development of location-invariant convolution kernels that successfully propagate weather patterns across the globe without requiring separate kernels for the polar and equatorial faces of the cube sphere. Without any loss of spectral power after the first two days, the model can be unrolled autoregressively for hundreds of steps into the future to generate realistic states of the atmosphere that respect seasonal trends, as showcased in one-year simulations.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 11, 2023

Sat-DN: Implicit Surface Reconstruction from Multi-View Satellite Images with Depth and Normal Supervision

With advancements in satellite imaging technology, acquiring high-resolution multi-view satellite imagery has become increasingly accessible, enabling rapid and location-independent ground model reconstruction. However, traditional stereo matching methods struggle to capture fine details, and while neural radiance fields (NeRFs) achieve high-quality reconstructions, their training time is prohibitively long. Moreover, challenges such as low visibility of building facades, illumination and style differences between pixels, and weakly textured regions in satellite imagery further make it hard to reconstruct reasonable terrain geometry and detailed building facades. To address these issues, we propose Sat-DN, a novel framework leveraging a progressively trained multi-resolution hash grid reconstruction architecture with explicit depth guidance and surface normal consistency constraints to enhance reconstruction quality. The multi-resolution hash grid accelerates training, while the progressive strategy incrementally increases the learning frequency, using coarse low-frequency geometry to guide the reconstruction of fine high-frequency details. The depth and normal constraints ensure a clear building outline and correct planar distribution. Extensive experiments on the DFC2019 dataset demonstrate that Sat-DN outperforms existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art results in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. The code is available at https://github.com/costune/SatDN.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 12, 2025

Edit2Restore:Few-Shot Image Restoration via Parameter-Efficient Adaptation of Pre-trained Editing Models

Image restoration has traditionally required training specialized models on thousands of paired examples per degradation type. We challenge this paradigm by demonstrating that powerful pre-trained text-conditioned image editing models can be efficiently adapted for multiple restoration tasks through parameter-efficient fine-tuning with remarkably few examples. Our approach fine-tunes LoRA adapters on FLUX.1 Kontext, a state-of-the-art 12B parameter flow matching model for image-to-image translation, using only 16-128 paired images per task, guided by simple text prompts that specify the restoration operation. Unlike existing methods that train specialized restoration networks from scratch with thousands of samples, we leverage the rich visual priors already encoded in large-scale pre-trained editing models, dramatically reducing data requirements while maintaining high perceptual quality. A single unified LoRA adapter, conditioned on task-specific text prompts, effectively handles multiple degradations including denoising, deraining, and dehazing. Through comprehensive ablation studies, we analyze: (i) the impact of training set size on restoration quality, (ii) trade-offs between task-specific versus unified multi-task adapters, (iii) the role of text encoder fine-tuning, and (iv) zero-shot baseline performance. While our method prioritizes perceptual quality over pixel-perfect reconstruction metrics like PSNR/SSIM, our results demonstrate that pre-trained image editing models, when properly adapted, offer a compelling and data-efficient alternative to traditional image restoration approaches, opening new avenues for few-shot, prompt-guided image enhancement. The code to reproduce our results are available at: https://github.com/makinyilmaz/Edit2Restore

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 6

Adver-City: Open-Source Multi-Modal Dataset for Collaborative Perception Under Adverse Weather Conditions

Adverse weather conditions pose a significant challenge to the widespread adoption of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) by impacting sensors like LiDARs and cameras. Even though Collaborative Perception (CP) improves AV perception in difficult conditions, existing CP datasets lack adverse weather conditions. To address this, we introduce Adver-City, the first open-source synthetic CP dataset focused on adverse weather conditions. Simulated in CARLA with OpenCDA, it contains over 24 thousand frames, over 890 thousand annotations, and 110 unique scenarios across six different weather conditions: clear weather, soft rain, heavy rain, fog, foggy heavy rain and, for the first time in a synthetic CP dataset, glare. It has six object categories including pedestrians and cyclists, and uses data from vehicles and roadside units featuring LiDARs, RGB and semantic segmentation cameras, GNSS, and IMUs. Its scenarios, based on real crash reports, depict the most relevant road configurations for adverse weather and poor visibility conditions, varying in object density, with both dense and sparse scenes, allowing for novel testing conditions of CP models. Benchmarks run on the dataset show that weather conditions created challenging conditions for perception models, with CoBEVT scoring 58.30/52.44/38.90 (AP@30/50/70). The dataset, code and documentation are available at https://labs.cs.queensu.ca/quarrg/datasets/adver-city/.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 8, 2024

ClimaX: A foundation model for weather and climate

Most state-of-the-art approaches for weather and climate modeling are based on physics-informed numerical models of the atmosphere. These approaches aim to model the non-linear dynamics and complex interactions between multiple variables, which are challenging to approximate. Additionally, many such numerical models are computationally intensive, especially when modeling the atmospheric phenomenon at a fine-grained spatial and temporal resolution. Recent data-driven approaches based on machine learning instead aim to directly solve a downstream forecasting or projection task by learning a data-driven functional mapping using deep neural networks. However, these networks are trained using curated and homogeneous climate datasets for specific spatiotemporal tasks, and thus lack the generality of numerical models. We develop and demonstrate ClimaX, a flexible and generalizable deep learning model for weather and climate science that can be trained using heterogeneous datasets spanning different variables, spatio-temporal coverage, and physical groundings. ClimaX extends the Transformer architecture with novel encoding and aggregation blocks that allow effective use of available compute while maintaining general utility. ClimaX is pre-trained with a self-supervised learning objective on climate datasets derived from CMIP6. The pre-trained ClimaX can then be fine-tuned to address a breadth of climate and weather tasks, including those that involve atmospheric variables and spatio-temporal scales unseen during pretraining. Compared to existing data-driven baselines, we show that this generality in ClimaX results in superior performance on benchmarks for weather forecasting and climate projections, even when pretrained at lower resolutions and compute budgets.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 24, 2023

RainShift: A Benchmark for Precipitation Downscaling Across Geographies

Earth System Models (ESM) are our main tool for projecting the impacts of climate change. However, running these models at sufficient resolution for local-scale risk-assessments is not computationally feasible. Deep learning-based super-resolution models offer a promising solution to downscale ESM outputs to higher resolutions by learning from data. Yet, due to regional variations in climatic processes, these models typically require retraining for each geographical area-demanding high-resolution observational data, which is unevenly available across the globe. This highlights the need to assess how well these models generalize across geographic regions. To address this, we introduce RainShift, a dataset and benchmark for evaluating downscaling under geographic distribution shifts. We evaluate state-of-the-art downscaling approaches including GANs and diffusion models in generalizing across data gaps between the Global North and Global South. Our findings reveal substantial performance drops in out-of-distribution regions, depending on model and geographic area. While expanding the training domain generally improves generalization, it is insufficient to overcome shifts between geographically distinct regions. We show that addressing these shifts through, for example, data alignment can improve spatial generalization. Our work advances the global applicability of downscaling methods and represents a step toward reducing inequities in access to high-resolution climate information.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 7, 2025

Learning Enriched Features for Real Image Restoration and Enhancement

With the goal of recovering high-quality image content from its degraded version, image restoration enjoys numerous applications, such as in surveillance, computational photography, medical imaging, and remote sensing. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved dramatic improvements over conventional approaches for image restoration task. Existing CNN-based methods typically operate either on full-resolution or on progressively low-resolution representations. In the former case, spatially precise but contextually less robust results are achieved, while in the latter case, semantically reliable but spatially less accurate outputs are generated. In this paper, we present a novel architecture with the collective goals of maintaining spatially-precise high-resolution representations through the entire network and receiving strong contextual information from the low-resolution representations. The core of our approach is a multi-scale residual block containing several key elements: (a) parallel multi-resolution convolution streams for extracting multi-scale features, (b) information exchange across the multi-resolution streams, (c) spatial and channel attention mechanisms for capturing contextual information, and (d) attention based multi-scale feature aggregation. In a nutshell, our approach learns an enriched set of features that combines contextual information from multiple scales, while simultaneously preserving the high-resolution spatial details. Extensive experiments on five real image benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method, named as MIRNet, achieves state-of-the-art results for a variety of image processing tasks, including image denoising, super-resolution, and image enhancement. The source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/swz30/MIRNet.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 15, 2020

Beyond Degradation Conditions: All-in-One Image Restoration via HOG Transformers

All-in-one image restoration, which aims to address diverse degradations within a unified framework, is critical for practical applications. However, existing methods rely on predicting and integrating degradation conditions, which can misactivate degradation-specific features in complex scenarios, limiting their restoration performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel all-in-one image restoration framework guided by Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG), named HOGformer. By leveraging the degradation-discriminative capability of HOG descriptors, HOGformer employs a dynamic self-attention mechanism that adaptively attends to long-range spatial dependencies based on degradation-aware HOG cues. To enhance the degradation sensitivity of attention inputs, we design a HOG-guided local dynamic-range convolution module that captures long-range degradation similarities while maintaining awareness of global structural information. Furthermore, we propose a dynamic interaction feed-forward module, efficiently increasing the model capacity to adapt to different degradations through channel-spatial interactions. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks, including adverse weather and natural degradations, demonstrate that HOGformer achieves state-of-the-art performance and generalizes effectively to complex real-world degradations. Code is available at https://github.com/Fire-friend/HOGformer.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 12, 2025

Challenges and Research Directions from the Operational Use of a Machine Learning Damage Assessment System via Small Uncrewed Aerial Systems at Hurricanes Debby and Helene

This paper details four principal challenges encountered with machine learning (ML) damage assessment using small uncrewed aerial systems (sUAS) at Hurricanes Debby and Helene that prevented, degraded, or delayed the delivery of data products during operations and suggests three research directions for future real-world deployments. The presence of these challenges is not surprising given that a review of the literature considering both datasets and proposed ML models suggests this is the first sUAS-based ML system for disaster damage assessment actually deployed as a part of real-world operations. The sUAS-based ML system was applied by the State of Florida to Hurricanes Helene (2 orthomosaics, 3.0 gigapixels collected over 2 sorties by a Wintra WingtraOne sUAS) and Debby (1 orthomosaic, 0.59 gigapixels collected via 1 sortie by a Wintra WingtraOne sUAS) in Florida. The same model was applied to crewed aerial imagery of inland flood damage resulting from post-tropical remnants of Hurricane Debby in Pennsylvania (436 orthophotos, 136.5 gigapixels), providing further insights into the advantages and limitations of sUAS for disaster response. The four challenges (variationin spatial resolution of input imagery, spatial misalignment between imagery and geospatial data, wireless connectivity, and data product format) lead to three recommendations that specify research needed to improve ML model capabilities to accommodate the wide variation of potential spatial resolutions used in practice, handle spatial misalignment, and minimize the dependency on wireless connectivity. These recommendations are expected to improve the effective operational use of sUAS and sUAS-based ML damage assessment systems for disaster response.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 18, 2025

CRS-Diff: Controllable Remote Sensing Image Generation with Diffusion Model

The emergence of generative models has revolutionized the field of remote sensing (RS) image generation. Despite generating high-quality images, existing methods are limited in relying mainly on text control conditions, and thus do not always generate images accurately and stably. In this paper, we propose CRS-Diff, a new RS generative framework specifically tailored for RS image generation, leveraging the inherent advantages of diffusion models while integrating more advanced control mechanisms. Specifically, CRS-Diff can simultaneously support text-condition, metadata-condition, and image-condition control inputs, thus enabling more precise control to refine the generation process. To effectively integrate multiple condition control information, we introduce a new conditional control mechanism to achieve multi-scale feature fusion, thus enhancing the guiding effect of control conditions. To our knowledge, CRS-Diff is the first multiple-condition controllable RS generative model. Experimental results in single-condition and multiple-condition cases have demonstrated the superior ability of our CRS-Diff to generate RS images both quantitatively and qualitatively compared with previous methods. Additionally, our CRS-Diff can serve as a data engine that generates high-quality training data for downstream tasks, e.g., road extraction. The code is available at https://github.com/Sonettoo/CRS-Diff.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 18, 2024