One-Step Specular Highlight Removal with Adapted Diffusion Models

Mahir Atmis, Levent Karacan, Mehmet Sarıgül; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025, pp. 16313-16322

Specular highlights, though valuable for human perception, are often undesirable in computer vision and graphics tasks as they can obscure surface details and affect analysis. Existing methods rely on multi-stage pipelines or multi-label datasets, making training difficult. In this study, we propose a one-step diffusion-based model for specular highlight removal, leveraging a pre-trained diffusion-based image generation model with an adaptation mechanism to enhance efficiency and adaptability. To further improve the adaptation process, we introduce ProbLoRA, a novel modification of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), designed to adapt the diffusion model for highlight removal effectively. Our approach surpasses existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance in both quantitative metrics and visual quality. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, highlighting its robustness and generalization capabilities.