DocPure: Prompt-Free Unified Document Restoration via Degradation-Aware Structure-Guided Wavelet Modulation

2026-08-10Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
AI summary

The authors developed DocPure, a method to fix damaged document images caused by problems like blurriness or noise. Unlike previous methods, DocPure doesn't need extra hints or separate models for each problem type. It uses a special system that learns the important structure of the document and combines detailed frequency information to improve restoration. Tests show DocPure works well on several restoration tasks like removing blur and shadows.

document restorationauto-encoderdegradation-awarewavelet transformimage denoisingdeblurringstructural priorfrequency-domaincompression artifact reductiondeshadowing
Authors
Lingming Su, Wanglong Lu, Tao Wang, Kaihao Zhang, Nan Zhang, Liyan An, Hanli Zhao
Abstract
High-quality document images are pivotal for information archiving and downstream automatic processing. However, they are frequently compromised by diverse degradations during uncontrolled acquisition and transmission. While unified document restoration techniques have been proposed to restore images from multiple degradations, they often struggle with training multiple degradation-specific models, reliance on manual task-specific prompts, or cross-task data pairing. To address these limitations, we propose DocPure, a prompt-free unified framework that achieves degradation-aware document restoration. We design a degradation-aware structure auto-encoder with degradation-informed routing regularization to predict clean structural priors from degraded inputs. The model is prompt-free at inference, and degradation labels are only used as auxiliary supervision for the routing regularization during training. Furthermore, we introduce a structure-guided wavelet interaction mechanism to bridge frequency-domain features and spatial semantics. Within the structure-guided wavelet interaction mechanism, a cross-frequency adaptive modulation utilizes low-frequency sub-bands to modulate high-frequency recovery, ensuring structural consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DocPure achieves strong performance compared with state-of-the-art methods across various tasks, including deblurring, denoising, compression artifact reduction, and deshadowing.