Towards Real-World Adverse Weather Image Restoration: Enhancing Clearness and Semantics with Vision-Language Models

Abstract: This paper addresses the limitations of adverse weather image restoration approaches trained on synthetic data when applied to real-world scenarios. We formulate a semi-supervised learning framework employing vision-LLMs to enhance restoration performance across diverse adverse weather conditions in real-world settings. Our approach involves assessing image clearness and providing semantics using vision-LLMs on real data, serving as supervision signals for training restoration models. For clearness enhancement, we use real-world data, utilizing a dual-step strategy with pseudo-labels assessed by vision-LLMs and weather prompt learning. For semantic enhancement, we integrate real-world data by adjusting weather conditions in vision-LLM descriptions while preserving semantic meaning. Additionally, we introduce an effective training strategy to bootstrap restoration performance. Our approach achieves superior results in real-world adverse weather image restoration, demonstrated through qualitative and quantitative comparisons with state-of-the-art works.