Exploring Spectral Characteristics for Single Image Reflection Removal

Abstract: Eliminating reflections caused by incident light interacting with reflective medium remains an ill-posed problem in the image restoration area. The primary challenge arises from the overlapping of reflection and transmission components in the captured images, which complicates the task of accurately distinguishing and recovering the clean background. Existing approaches typically address reflection removal solely in the image domain, ignoring the spectral property variations of reflected light, which hinders their ability to effectively discern reflections. In this paper, we start with a new perspective on spectral learning, and propose the Spectral Codebook to reconstruct the optical spectrum of the reflection image. The reflections can be effectively distinguished by perceiving the wavelength differences between different light sources in the spectrum. To leverage the reconstructed spectrum, we design two spectral prior refinement modules to re-distribute pixels in the spatial dimension and adaptively enhance the spectral differences along the wavelength dimension. Furthermore, we present the Spectrum-Aware Transformer to jointly recover the transmitted content in spectral and pixel domains. Experimental results on three different reflection benchmarks demonstrate the superiority and generalization ability of our method compared to state-of-the-art models.