CLEAR: Color-Texture Latent Alignment for Single Image Reflection Removal

Tu Vo, Sheir A. Zaheer, Chan Y. Park

Single Image Reflection Removal (SIRR) seeks to recover the transmitted scene from a photograph captured through glass. Recent latent restoration methods use pretrained generative priors, but many recover detail by feeding high-frequency features from the degraded input back into the decoder. This works for degradations such as blur, noise, or haze, where input detail mostly belongs to the scene. It is less suitable for SIRR, where reflections add a second structured layer: directly reusing the input's skip connections can sharpen the image while also bringing reflection edges back. Latent compression also introduces color drift and fine-detail loss. We propose CLEAR (Color-Texture LatEnt Alignment for Single Image Reflection Removal), a deterministic, single-timestep, non-iterative latent framework that uses a pretrained latent diffusion backbone as a natural-image prior. A physics-guided separator organizes the prediction around the transmission, reflection, and residue formation model and outputs coarse layer latents in one forward pass. The Hybrid Feature Alignment Module (HFAM) then treats input-derived skips as contaminated layer-mixture features. It rectifies their…