UP-Restorer: When Unrolling Meets Prompts for Unified Image Restoration

All-in-one restoration needs to implicitly distinguish between different degradation conditions and apply specific prior constraints accordingly. To fulfill this goal, our work makes the first effort to create an all-in-one restoration via unrolling from the typical maximum a-posterior optimization function. This unrolling framework naturally leads to the construction of progressively solving models, which are equivalent to a diffusion enhancer taking as input dynamically generated prompts. Under a score-based diffusion model, the prompts are integrated for propogating and updating several context-related variables, i.e. transmission map, atmospheric light map and noise or rain map progressively. Such learned prompt generation process, which simulates the nonlinear operations in the unrolled solution, is combined with linear operations owning clear physics implications to make the diffusion models well reguarlized and more effective in learning degradation-related visual priors. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves significant performance improvements across various image restoration tasks, realizing true all-in-one image restoration.