MDIRNET: Multi-Degradation Image Restoration Network via Deep Unfolding

Abstract

Real images often exhibit unknown and mixed degradations, making restoration substantially more challenging than single-task image restoration because multiple distortion types interact within the same observation. Consequently, existing methods often rely on prior knowledge of the degradation type or separate task-specific models, which may oversmooth fine structures or leave residual artifacts, motivating a compact model-driven alternative. We propose the Multi-Degradation Image Restoration Network (MDIRNET), a unified framework that combines a model-driven low-rank prior with end-to-end learning. Here, unified refers to joint training on three degradation types: noise, rain, and blur. A single MDIRNET model restores all three without requiring task-specific models, modules, or branches at inference. The low-rank prior exploits the redundancy and compact structure of natural image patches. To identify this underlying low-dimensional representation, we formalize restoration via Orthogonal Variational PCA (OVPCA) and translate its iterative inference into a deep unfolding network. To handle spatially non-uniform corruption and local content variability, we further introduce a learnable patch-partitioning strategy and a lightweight dynamic rank-allocation module that predicts the appropriate subspace dimension for each region. Spatially adaptive reconstruction refinement is performed using a supervised attention module. Extensive experiments on standard denoising, deblurring, and deraining benchmarks show that MDIRNET achieves competitive or superior performance over strong baselines across most metrics, while controlled mixed-degradation experiments demonstrate consistent performance across the evaluated synthetic degradation combinations. The code is available at https://github.com/ScholarForge/mdirnet.git.