# Relationship Quantification of Image Degradations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.04148 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04148/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Dec 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [Beyond a Gaussian Denoiser: Residual Learning of Deep CNN for Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03981/) (2016)
- [Pre-Trained Image Processing Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00364/) (2020)
- [Multi-Stage Progressive Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02808/) (2021)
- [Taskonomy: Disentangling Task Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08328/) (2018)
- [Benchmarking Single Image Dehazing and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04143/) (2017)
- [DeblurGAN: Blind Motion Deblurring Using Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07064/) (2017)
- [FFA-Net: Feature Fusion Attention Network for Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07559/) (2019)
- [Progressive Image Deraining Networks: A Better and Simpler Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09221/) (2019)
- [TransWeather: Transformer-based Restoration of Images Degraded by Adverse Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14813/) (2021)
- [Residual Non-local Attention Networks for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10082/) (2019)
- [Multi-Scale Boosted Dehazing Network with Dense Feature Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13388/) (2020)
- [GridDehazeNet: Attention-Based Multi-Scale Network for Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03245/) (2019)
- [Efficiently Identifying Task Groupings for Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04617/) (2021)
- [Contrastive Learning for Compact Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09367/) (2021)
- [Recurrent Squeeze-and-Excitation Context Aggregation Net for Single Image Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05698/) (2018)
- [DesnowNet: Context-Aware Deep Network for Snow Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04512/) (2017)
- [Residual Dense Network for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10477/) (2018)
- [Interpreting Super-Resolution Networks with Local Attribution Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11036/) (2020)
- [Gated Context Aggregation Network for Image Dehazing and Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08747/) (2018)
- [You Only Look Yourself: Unsupervised and Untrained Single Image Dehazing Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16829/) (2020)
- [Triple-level Model Inferred Collaborative Network Architecture for Video Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04459/) (2021)
- [Restoring Images with Unknown Degradation Factors by Recurrent Use of a Multi-branch Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04508/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Neural Degradation Representation Learning for All-In-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12848/) (2023)
- [DSwinIR: Rethinking Window-based Attention for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04869/) (2025)
- [Decomposition Ascribed Synergistic Learning for Unified Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00759/) (2023)
- [All-in-One Video Restoration under Smoothly Evolving Unknown Weather Degradations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.00533/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we study two challenging but less-touched problems in image restoration, namely, i) how to quantify the relationship between image degradations and ii) how to improve the performance of a specific restoration task using the quantified relationship. To tackle the first challenge, we proposed a Degradation Relationship Index (DRI) which is defined as the mean drop rate difference in the validation loss between two models which are respectively trained using the anchor degradation and the mixture of the anchor and the auxiliary degradations. Through quantifying the degradation relationship using DRI, we reveal that i) a positive DRI always predicts performance improvement by using the specific degradation as an auxiliary to train models; ii) the degradation proportion is crucial to the image restoration performance. In other words, the restoration performance is improved only if the anchor and the auxiliary degradations are mixed with an appropriate proportion. Based on the observations, we further propose a simple but effective method (dubbed DPD) to estimate whether the given degradation combinations could improve the performance on the anchor degradation with the assistance of the auxiliary degradation. Extensive experimental results verify the effectiveness of our method in dehazing, denoising, deraining, and desnowing. The code will be released after acceptance.