Taming Generative Diffusion Model for Task-Oriented Infrared Imaging

Tengyu Ma, Zhilong Dai, Yubo Diao, Guanming An, Long Ma, Jinyuan Liu, Risheng Liu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 30843-30853

Infrared imaging is essential for perception in harsh environments. However, dynamically coupled degradation factors severely impair visual quality and downstream semantic accuracy. Although generative diffusion models provide strong image restoration priors, high computational cost and physical inconsistency limit their application in infrared sensing. To bridge these gaps, we reformulate infrared imaging as a single-step diffusion process, aligning degraded observations with trajectory latent states via dynamic timestep estimation to leverage timestep-specific diffusion priors for high-fidelity reconstruction. Meanwhile, we introduce a spectral regularization term to enforce thermal radiation constraints and ensure physical consistency. Subsequently, a task-aware low-rank adaptation mechanism is devised through dynamic prompting to enable efficient transfer across downstream infrared tasks. Experiments demonstrate our method surpasses existing approaches in restoration quality, semantic structure preservation, and task generalization. The code is available at https://github.com/csmty/InfraredIR.