# NTIRE 2026 The Second Challenge on Day and Night Raindrop Removal for Dual-Focused Images: Methods and Results

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.10634 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10634/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 80 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Simple Baselines for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04676/) (2022)
- [Deep Joint Rain Detection and Removal from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07769/) (2016)
- [MAXIM: Multi-Axis MLP for Image Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02973/) (2022)
- [Multi-Scale Progressive Fusion Network for Single Image Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10985/) (2020)
- [Density-aware Single Image De-raining using a Multi-stream Dense Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07412/) (2018)
- [TransWeather: Transformer-based Restoration of Images Degraded by Adverse Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14813/) (2021)
- [Restoring Vision in Adverse Weather Conditions with Patch-Based Denoising Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14626/) (2022)
- [Attentive Generative Adversarial Network for Raindrop Removal from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10098/) (2017)
- [Spatial Attentive Single-Image Deraining with a High Quality Real Rain Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01538/) (2019)
- [Heavy Rain Image Restoration: Integrating Physics Model and Conditional Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05050/) (2019)
- [Single Image Deraining: A Comprehensive Benchmark Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08558/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Night Image Enhancement: When Layer Decomposition Meets Light-Effects Suppression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10564/) (2022)
- [Restoring Images in Adverse Weather Conditions via Histogram Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10172/) (2024)
- [Codabench: Flexible, Easy-to-Use and Reproducible Benchmarking Platform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05802/) (2021)
- [FreqMamba: Viewing Mamba from a Frequency Perspective for Image Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09476/) (2024)
- [RainMamba: Enhanced Locality Learning with State Space Models for Video Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21773/) (2024)
- [Seven ways to improve example-based single image super resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02228/) (2015)
- [Enhancing Visibility in Nighttime Haze Images Using Guided APSF and Gradient Adaptive Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01738/) (2023)
- [The Eleventh NTIRE 2026 Efficient Super-Resolution Challenge Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03198/) (2026)
- [Teaching Tailored to Talent: Adverse Weather Restoration via Prompt Pool and Depth-Anything Constraint](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15739/) (2024)
- [I Can See Clearly Now : Image Restoration via De-Raining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00893/) (2019)
- [NightHaze: Nighttime Image Dehazing via Self-Prior Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07408/) (2024)
- [NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Day and Night Raindrop Removal for Dual-Focused Images: Methods and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12711/) (2025)
- [Learning Disentangled Feature Representation for Hybrid-distorted Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11430/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Robust AI-Generated Image Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11487/) (2026)
- [NTIRE 2026 The 3rd Restore Any Image Model (RAIM) Challenge: AI Flash Portrait (Track 3)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11230/) (2026)
- [NTIRE 2026 The 3rd Restore Any Image Model (RAIM) Challenge: Professional Image Quality Assessment (Track 1)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12512/) (2026)
- [The Fourth Challenge on Image Super-Resolution (×4) at NTIRE 2026: Benchmark Results and Method Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14558/) (2026)
- [NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Video Saliency Prediction: Methods and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14816/) (2026)
- [NTIRE 2026 Rip Current Detection and Segmentation (RipDetSeg) Challenge Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17070/) (2026)
- [Low Light Image Enhancement Challenge at NTIRE 2026](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17669/) (2026)
- [The First Challenge on Remote Sensing Infrared Image Super-Resolution at NTIRE 2026: Benchmark Results and Method Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21312/) (2026)
- [The First Challenge on Mobile Real-World Image Super-Resolution at NTIRE 2026: Benchmark Results and Method Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17306/) (2026)
- [Robust Deepfake Detection, NTIRE 2026 Challenge: Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24163/) (2026)
- [The First Controllable Bokeh Rendering Challenge at NTIRE 2026](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05510/) (2026)
- [The Third Challenge on Image Denoising at NTIRE 2026: Methods and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.16031/) (2026)
- [NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Efficient Low Light Image Enhancement: Methods and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02212/) (2026)
- [NTIRE 2026 Low-light Enhancement: Twilight Cowboy Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09782/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents an overview of the NTIRE 2026 Second Challenge on Day and Night Raindrop Removal for Dual-Focused Images. Building upon the success of the first edition, this challenge attracted a wide range of impressive solutions, all developed and evaluated on our real-world Raindrop Clarity dataset~citejin2024raindrop. For this edition, we adjust the dataset with 14,139 images for training, 407 images for validation, and 593 images for testing. The primary goal of this challenge is to establish a strong and practical benchmark for the removal of raindrops under various illumination and focus conditions. In total, 168 teams have registered for the competition, and 17 teams submitted valid final solutions and fact sheets for the testing phase. The submitted methods achieved strong performance on the Raindrop Clarity dataset, demonstrating the growing progress in this challenging task.