Diffusion Models for Image Restoration and Enhancement: A Comprehensive Survey

Understand

Image restoration (IR) has been an indispensable and challenging task in the low-level vision field, which strives to improve the subjective quality of images distorted by various forms of degradation.

• Recently, the diffusion model has achieved significant advancements in the visual generation of AIGC, thereby raising an intuitive question, "whether diffusion model can boost image restoration".
• To answer this, some pioneering studies attempt to integrate diffusion models into the image restoration task, resulting in superior performances than previous GAN-based methods.
• Despite that, a comprehensive and enlightening survey on diffusion model-based image restoration remains scarce.