This workshop paper comprehensively reviews the First Challenge on Unified Removal of Raindrops and Reflections. The challenge aims to address a frequently encountered practical problem in the field of autonomous driving, i.e., raindrop-reflection composite degradation on rainy days. This competition attracted 149 registered participants and received 12 valid final submissions with corresponding fact sheets, significantly contributing to the progress of unified removal of raindrops and reflections. All the methods are developed and evaluated on our real-shot RainDrop and ReFlection (RDRF) dataset. A detailed analysis of the submitted methods and corresponding results is provided in this report, which highlights effective approaches and provides interesting insights for future research.
Zepeng Wang, Jiagao Hu, Fuhao Li +3cs.CV cs.AI eess.IV
Videos captured through glass often contain reflections that degrade visual quality and interfere with downstream vision tasks. Although single-image reflection removal has been extensively studied, video reflection removal remains largely underexplored due to the lack of paired video data, temporally coherent removal models, and dedicated evaluation benchmarks. We present a closed-loop framework that unifies physics-grounded reflection simulation, diffusion-based video dereflection, and benchmark evaluation. Our S2R-Synthesis pipeline generates paired reflected and reflection-free videos by performing physics-grounded augmentation in the structure space and rendering realistic reflected videos with a trained video diffusion renderer; the augmentation models key glass-related effects including roughness-induced blur, thickness-induced ghosting, and reflectance variation. Based on the synthesized data, we introduce S2R-Removal, the first diffusion-based video reflection removal model, which adapts a pretrained video diffusion prior through reflection-aware latent adaptation and one-step pixel-geometric refinement, recovering the clean transmission in a single denoising step. We further build S2R-Bench, the first benchmark for video reflection removal, supporting both full-reference evaluation and real-world human perceptual assessment. Experiments on S2R-Bench and multiple public image benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance and faster inference than even non-diffusion baselines, and validate the effectiveness of S2R-Synthesis. Project page: https://codingwzp.github.io/VideoDereflection_S2R.
Despite remarkable progress in reflection removal, current methods primarily exploit static image priors from a single frame and still suffer from severe residual artifacts due to the inherent ambiguity between the reflection and transmission layers. In this paper, we propose leveraging event signals to break this ambiguity. By employing event cameras to capture micro-dynamics, we reveal the differential motion between these two layers. We thereby present a novel event-driven reflection removal network, EvReflection, that utilizes these dynamic cues for layer separation. Specifically, we design a Micro-Dynamics Decoupler to disentangle layer-specific motions from event streams as priors, which then guide a Parallax-Attention Rectifier to cleanly remove artifacts from the RGB image. Furthermore, to address data scarcity, we develop a parallax-aware simulation pipeline and construct the EVR$^2$ benchmark dataset, the first real-world dataset for this task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EvReflection achieves state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks, surpassing the best competing method by more than 1.6 dB and 1.2 dB in PSNR, respectively. The code, dataset, and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/JiaxiaoWang/EvReflection.
Single-image reflection removal aims to recover a clean transmission layer from one image captured through glass. We study an explicit decomposition pipeline built on RDNet and introduce LowAux, a training-only low-pass reflection auxiliary objective. The original residual target remains the main reflection supervision, while symmetrically filtered prediction and target provide a stable low-frequency constraint. We further incorporate scene-balanced real pairs from RRW to broaden real-scene coverage and improve cross-dataset generalization. To avoid evaluation discrepancies caused by model-specific resizing, padding, output quantization, and metric code, we build a unified public benchmark over CEILNet, Real20, Postcard, Objects, and Wild. Under the same evaluator, the proposed system obtains a five-dataset macro average of 27.546 dB PSNR, 0.9220 SSIM, 0.9751 NCC, and 0.004760 LMSE, achieving the highest macro-average PSNR, SSIM, and NCC and the lowest LMSE among the compared public checkpoints and internal variants. Per-dataset and qualitative analyses show that the main benefit is a more balanced performance across diverse reflection distributions, while clear semantic reflections in Postcard remain challenging.
Single-image reflection removal (SIRR) seeks to recover the transmission layer from a mixture corrupted by reflections -- a severely ill-posed problem. Existing methods operate in pixel space, where the nonlinear sRGB formation model entangles the two layers and limits generalization. We observe that pretrained VAE latent spaces exhibit substantially lower coherence between image layers compared to pixel space, providing a more favorable working space for decomposition. Building on this finding, we propose \textbf{PRISM} (Pretrained-latent Reflection Image Separation Model), which reinterprets SIRR as a latent linear separation problem. Under an approximate additive formulation in latent space, PRISM learns a flow matching velocity field on a pretrained FLUX backbone that recovers both transmission and reflection in a single forward pass. To enforce robust disentanglement, we introduce a Latent Composition Consistency (LCC) strategy that constructs synthetic mixtures by swapping reflection latents across samples and enforces consistent decomposition via a cycle loss. We further propose a Layer Contrastive Separation (LCS) loss that promotes semantic separation between layers through patch-level contrastive learning, without requiring explicit reflection targets. Experiments on six benchmarks demonstrate that PRISM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods by significant margins, with strong generalization to in-the-wild images.