UHD-processer: Unified UHD Image Restoration with Progressive Frequency Learning and Degradation-aware Prompts

We introduce UHD-Processor, a unified and robust framework for all-in-one image restoration, which is particularly resource-efficient for Ultra-High-Definition (UHD) images. To address the limitations of traditional all-in-one methods that rely on complex restoration backbones, our strategy employs a frequency domain decoupling progressive learning technique, motivated by curriculum learning, to incrementally learn restoration mappings from low to high frequencies. This approach incorporates specialized sub-network modules to effectively tackle different frequency bands in a divide-and-conquer manner, significantly enhancing the learning capability of simpler networks. Moreover, to accommodate the high-resolution characteristics of UHD images, we developed a variational autoencoder (VAE)-based framework that reduces computational complexity by modeling a concise latent space. It integrates task-specific degradation awareness in the encoder and frequency selection in the decoder, enhancing task comprehension and generalization. Our unified model is able to handle various degradations such as denoising, deblurring, dehazing, low-lighting, etc. Experimental evaluations extensively showcase the effectiveness of our dual-strategy approach, significantly improving UHD image restoration and achieving cutting-edge performance across diverse conditions.