# Harmonizing Light and Darkness: A Symphony of Prior-guided Data Synthesis and Adaptive Focus for Nighttime Flare Removal

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.00313 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00313/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [Uformer: A General U-Shaped Transformer for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03106/) (2021)
- [Multi-Stage Progressive Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02808/) (2021)
- [Deep Retinex Decomposition for Low-Light Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.04560/) (2018)
- [Kindling the Darkness: A Practical Low-light Image Enhancer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04161/) (2019)
- [DehazeNet: An End-to-End System for Single Image Haze Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.07661/) (2016)
- [Density-aware Single Image De-raining using a Multi-stream Dense Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07412/) (2018)
- [HINet: Half Instance Normalization Network for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06086/) (2021)
- [Recurrent Squeeze-and-Excitation Context Aggregation Net for Single Image Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05698/) (2018)
- [Structure-Preserving Super Resolution with Gradient Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13081/) (2020)
- [Single Image Reflection Separation with Perceptual Losses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05376/) (2018)
- [How to Train Neural Networks for Flare Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12485/) (2020)
- [Flare7K: A Phenomenological Nighttime Flare Removal Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06570/) (2022)
- [Nighttime Dehazing with a Synthetic Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03864/) (2020)
- [Flare7K++: Mixing Synthetic and Real Datasets for Nighttime Flare Removal and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04236/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Single Image Dehazing Using Dark Channel Prior Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07051/) (2018)
- [Learning Scene Structure Guidance via Cross-Task Knowledge Transfer for Single Depth Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12955/) (2021)
- [Nighttime Smartphone Reflective Flare Removal Using Optical Center Symmetry Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15046/) (2023)
- [Improving Lens Flare Removal with General Purpose Pipeline and Multiple Light Sources Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16460/) (2023)
- [FAMED-Net: A Fast and Accurate Multi-scale End-to-end Dehazing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04334/) (2019)
- [Understanding and Tackling Scattering and Reflective Flare for Mobile Camera Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14180/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [FlareX: A Physics-Informed Dataset for Lens Flare Removal via 2D Synthesis and 3D Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09995/) (2025)
- [DFDNet: Dynamic Frequency-Guided De-Flare Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17489/) (2025)
- [Difflare: Removing Image Lens Flare with Latent Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14746/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Intense light sources often produce flares in captured images at night, which deteriorates the visual quality and negatively affects downstream applications. In order to train an effective flare removal network, a reliable dataset is essential. The mainstream flare removal datasets are semi-synthetic to reduce human labour, but these datasets do not cover typical scenarios involving multiple scattering flares. To tackle this issue, we synthesize a prior-guided dataset named Flare7K*, which contains multi-flare images where the brightness of flares adheres to the laws of illumination. Besides, flares tend to occupy localized regions of the image but existing networks perform flare removal on the entire image and sometimes modify clean areas incorrectly. Therefore, we propose a plug-and-play Adaptive Focus Module (AFM) that can adaptively mask the clean background areas and assist models in focusing on the regions severely affected by flares. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our data synthesis method can better simulate real-world scenes and several models equipped with AFM achieve state-of-the-art performance on the real-world test dataset.