Mohab Kishawy

Advancements in image sensing have elevated the importance of Ultra-High-Definition Image Restoration (UHD IR). Traditional methods, such as extreme downsampling or transformation from the spatial to the frequency domain, encounter significant drawbacks: downsampling induces irreversible information loss in UHD images, while our frequency analysis reveals that pure frequency-domain approaches are ineffective for spatially confined image artifacts, primarily due to the loss of degradation locality. To overcome these limitations, we present RetinexDual, a novel Retinex theory-based framework designed for generalized UHD IR tasks. RetinexDual leverages two complementary sub-networks: the Scale-Attentive maMBA (SAMBA) and the Frequency Illumination Adaptor (FIA). SAMBA, responsible for correcting the reflectance component, utilizes a coarse-to-fine mechanism to overcome the causal modeling of mamba, which effectively reduces artifacts and restores intricate details. On the other hand, FIA ensures precise correction of color and illumination distortions by operating in the frequency domain and leveraging the global context provided by it. Evaluating RetinexDual on four UHD IR tasks, namely deraining, deblurring, dehazing, and Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE), shows that it outperforms recent methods qualitatively and quantitatively. Ablation studies demonstrate the importance of employing distinct designs for each branch in RetinexDual, as well as the effectiveness of its various components.

We propose RetinexDualV2, a unified, physically grounded dual-branch framework for diverse Ultra-High-Definition (UHD) image restoration. Unlike generic models, our method employs a Task-Specific Physical Grounding Module (TS-PGM) to extract degradation-aware priors (e.g., rain masks and dark channels). These explicitly guide a Retinex decomposition network via a novel Physical-Conditioned Multi-head Self-Attention (PC-MSA) mechanism, enabling robust reflection and illumination correction. This physical conditioning allows a single architecture to handle various complex degradations seamlessly, without task-specific structural modifications. RetinexDualV2 demonstrates exceptional generalizability, securing 4th place in the NTIRE 2026 Day and Night Raindrop Removal Challenge and 5th place in the Joint Noise Low-light Enhancement (JNLLIE) Challenge. Extensive experiments confirm the state-of-the-art performance and efficiency of our physically motivated approach. Code is available at https://github.com/ErrorLogic1211/RetinexDual/tree/master/RetinexDualV2

Autonomous Vehicles (AV) is one of the most evolving industries in the last decade. However, one of the bottlenecks of this evolution is providing data that contains different scenarios and scenes to improve the models without exposing the privacy and security of the edge vehicles. The authors of this research propose a secure and efficient novel solution for lane segmentation in AVs through the use of Federated Learning (FL). FedLane involves initial training of U-Net, ResUNet, and ResUNet++ models, followed by real-time inference in edge devices and the application of FL to update the server model using clients’ data. The study found that FL has enhanced the performance of lane segmentation significantly over baseline, enabling decentralized privacy-preserving collaborative optimization with increased dice coef from 0.9429 to 0.9794 for U-Net, from 0.9291 to 0.9854 for ResUNet and from 0.9079 to 0.9675 for ResUNet++. Additionally, the models show increased stability over the training iterations, highlighting the potential of FL to play a significant role in the future of automation in the AV industry.