MIPI 2024 Challenge on Nighttime Flare Removal: Methods and Results
Yuekun Dai, Dafeng Zhang, Xiaoming Li, Zongsheng Yue, Chongyi Li, Shangchen Zhou, Ruicheng Feng, Peiqing Yang, Zhezhu Jin, Guanqun Liu, Chen Change Loy, Lize Zhang, Shuai Liu, Chaoyu Feng, Luyang Wang, Shuan Chen, Guangqi Shao, Xiaotao Wang, Lei Lei, Qirui Yang, Qihua Cheng, Zhiqiang Xu, Yihao Liu, Huanjing Yue, Jingyu Yang, Florin-Alexandru Vasluianu, Zongwei Wu, George Ciubotariu, Radu Timofte, Zhao Zhang, Suiyi Zhao, Bo Wang, Zhichao Zuo, Yanyan Wei, Kuppa Sai Sri Teja, Jayakar Reddy A, Girish Rongali, Kaushik Mitra, Zhihao Ma, Yongxu Liu, Wanying Zhang, Wei Shang, Yuhong He, Long Peng, Zhongxin Yu, Shaofei Luo, Jian Wang, Yuqi Miao, Baiang Li, Gang Wei, Rakshank Verma, Ritik Maheshwari, Rahul Tekchandani, Praful Hambarde, Satya Narayan Tazi, Santosh Kumar Vipparthi, Subrahmanyam Murala, Haopeng Zhang, Yingli Hou, Mingde Yao, Levin M S, Aniruth Sundararajan, Hari Kumar A
TL;DR
The paper addresses nighttime lens flare removal for mobile imaging by introducing the MIPI 2024 Nighttime Flare Removal track, a 2K-resolution paired dataset, and a perceptual-focused evaluation framework. It surveys a diverse set of methods, including diffusion-based two-stage restoration, transformer- and frequency-domain networks, and ensemble/data-augmentation approaches, with MiAlgo_AI, SFNet-FR, and BigGuy exemplifying top strategies. The results demonstrate state-of-the-art perceptual quality (LPIPS) and competitive PSNR/SSIM on real nighttime data, with several teams leveraging real nighttime imagery and cross-domain augmentation to close distribution gaps. The benchmark and submitted methods offer practical pathways toward real-time, high-quality flare removal on mobile devices, contributing both dataset resources and a spectrum of techniques for robust nighttime imaging. Overall, the work advances the field by providing a platform for comparing flare-removal methods, guiding future improvements in efficiency, realism, and cross-device generalization.
Abstract
The increasing demand for computational photography and imaging on mobile platforms has led to the widespread development and integration of advanced image sensors with novel algorithms in camera systems. However, the scarcity of high-quality data for research and the rare opportunity for in-depth exchange of views from industry and academia constrain the development of mobile intelligent photography and imaging (MIPI). Building on the achievements of the previous MIPI Workshops held at ECCV 2022 and CVPR 2023, we introduce our third MIPI challenge including three tracks focusing on novel image sensors and imaging algorithms. In this paper, we summarize and review the Nighttime Flare Removal track on MIPI 2024. In total, 170 participants were successfully registered, and 14 teams submitted results in the final testing phase. The developed solutions in this challenge achieved state-of-the-art performance on Nighttime Flare Removal. More details of this challenge and the link to the dataset can be found at https://mipi-challenge.org/MIPI2024/.