When Color-Space Decoupling Meets Diffusion for Adverse-Weather Image Restoration

Abstract: Adverse Weather Image Restoration (AWIR) is a highly challenging task due to the unpredictable and dynamic nature of weather-related degradations. Traditional task-specific methods often fail to generalize to unseen or complex degradation types, while recent prompt-learning approaches depend heavily on the degradation estimation capabilities of vision-LLMs, resulting in inconsistent restorations. In this paper, we propose \textbf{LCDiff}, a novel framework comprising two key components: \textit{Lumina-Chroma Decomposition Network} (LCDN) and \textit{Lumina-Guided Diffusion Model} (LGDM). LCDN processes degraded images in the YCbCr color space, separately handling degradation-related luminance and degradation-invariant chrominance components. This decomposition effectively mitigates weather-induced degradation while preserving color fidelity. To further enhance restoration quality, LGDM leverages degradation-related luminance information as a guiding condition, eliminating the need for explicit degradation prompts. Additionally, LGDM incorporates a \textit{Dynamic Time Step Loss} to optimize the denoising network, ensuring a balanced recovery of both low- and high-frequency features in the image. Finally, we present DriveWeather, a comprehensive all-weather driving dataset designed to enable robust evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach surpasses state-of-the-art methods, setting a new benchmark in AWIR. The dataset and code are available at: https://github.com/fiwy0527/LCDiff.