NTIRE 2024 Restore Any Image Model (RAIM) in the Wild Challenge

In this paper, we review the NTIRE 2024 challenge on Restore Any Image Model (RAIM) in the Wild. The RAIM challenge constructed a benchmark for image restoration in the wild, including real-world images with/without reference ground truth in various scenarios from real applications. The participants were required to restore the real-captured images from complex and unknown degradation, where generative perceptual quality and fidelity are desired in the restoration result. The challenge consisted of two tasks. Task one employed real referenced data pairs, where quantitative evaluation is available. Task two used unpaired images, and a comprehensive user study was conducted. The challenge attracted more than 200 registrations, where 39 of them submitted results with more than 400 submissions. Top-ranked methods improved the state-of-the-art restoration performance and obtained unanimous recognition from all 18 judges. The proposed datasets are available at https : //drive.google.com/file/d/1DqbxUoiUqkAIkExu3jZAqoElr_nu1IXb/view?usp=sharing and the homepage of this challenge is at https : //codalab.lisn.upsaclay.fr/competitions/17632.

1. Introduction

Image restoration, aiming at recovering high-quality images from their low-quality counterparts, is one of the most popular low-level vision tasks in the research community. However, there has been a large gap between Academic research and Industrial application for a long time. For example, the image signal processing (ISP) systems on digital cameras always face mixed and complex degradations, yet most methods in academic research are designed and evaluated based on simulated and limited degradation. How to design and train a model that can be generalized to practical applications is a challenging yet highly valuable problem.