# DFDNet: Dynamic Frequency-Guided De-Flare Network

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17489 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17489/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [Uformer: A General U-Shaped Transformer for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03106/) (2021)
- [Retinexformer: One-stage Retinex-based Transformer for Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06705/) (2023)
- [Image Restoration with Mean-Reverting Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11699/) (2023)
- [The 2018 PIRM Challenge on Perceptual Image Super-resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07517/) (2018)
- [R2RNet: Low-light Image Enhancement via Real-low to Real-normal Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14501/) (2021)
- [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)
- [WaveDM: Wavelet-Based Diffusion Models for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13819/) (2023)
- [Removing Diffraction Image Artifacts in Under-Display Camera via Dynamic Skip Connection Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09556/) (2021)
- [Flare7K++: Mixing Synthetic and Real Datasets for Nighttime Flare Removal and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04236/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Automatic Flare Spot Artifact Detection and Removal in Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04384/) (2021)
- [Seeing the Unseen: A Frequency Prompt Guided Transformer for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00288/) (2024)
- [Multi-Expert Adaptive Selection: Task-Balancing for All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19139/) (2024)
- [Underwater Image Restoration Through a Prior Guided Hybrid Sense Approach and Extensive Benchmark Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02701/) (2025)
- [Generating Aligned Pseudo-Supervision from Non-Aligned Data for Image Restoration in Under-Display Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06019/) (2023)
- [MFDNet: Multi-Frequency Deflare Network for Efficient Nighttime Flare Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18079/) (2024)
- [KAN See In the Dark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.03404/) (2024)
- [Harmonizing Light and Darkness: A Symphony of Prior-guided Data Synthesis and Adaptive Focus for Nighttime Flare Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00313/) (2024)
- [Unified Image Restoration and Enhancement: Degradation Calibrated Cycle Reconstruction Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14630/) (2024)
- [Optimizing 4D Lookup Table for Low-light Video Enhancement via Wavelet Priori](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08585/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [UniSER: A Foundation Model for Unified Soft Effects Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14183/) (2025)
- [Semi-LAR: Semi-supervised Contrastive Learning with Linear Attention for Removal of Nighttime Flares](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18156/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Strong light sources in nighttime photography frequently produce flares in images, significantly degrading visual quality and impacting the performance of downstream tasks. While some progress has been made, existing methods continue to struggle with removing large-scale flare artifacts and repairing structural damage in regions near the light source. We observe that these challenging flare artifacts exhibit more significant discrepancies from the reference images in the frequency domain compared to the spatial domain. Therefore, this paper presents a novel dynamic frequency-guided deflare network (DFDNet) that decouples content information from flare artifacts in the frequency domain, effectively removing large-scale flare artifacts. Specifically, DFDNet consists mainly of a global dynamic frequency-domain guidance (GDFG) module and a local detail guidance module (LDGM). The GDFG module guides the network to perceive the frequency characteristics of flare artifacts by dynamically optimizing global frequency domain features, effectively separating flare information from content information. Additionally, we design an LDGM via a contrastive learning strategy that aligns the local features of the light source with the reference image, reduces local detail damage from flare removal, and improves fine-grained image restoration. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of performance. The code is available at hrefhttps://github.com/AXNing/DFDNethttps://github.com/AXNing/DFDNet.