HiDRA: Hierarchical Degradation Representation and Adaptation with Generative Priors for Enhancing Infrared Vision

Thermal infrared (TIR) imaging enables robust perception in adverse conditions. However, it often suffers from complex degradations (e.g., fixed-pattern noise and lowresolution) due to sensor limitations and environmental dynamics. Existing methods, whether traditional or learningbased, easily fail under composite and varying degradation. Pre-trained generative models showcase powerful capabilities for alleviating degradations but lack effective tools to adapt visible generative priors to TIR-specific characteristics. To overcome these challenges, we propose a Hierarchical Degradation Representation and Adaptation (HiDRA) framework to decompose the enhancement procedure into degradation representation estimation and generative model fine-tuning. The degradation representation estimation aims to disentangle TIR degradation patterns, which then guide the parameter adaptation for thermal image enhancement. Additionally, we introduce a hierarchical adaptation solution that aggregates learning across varying degradation levels, further improving robustness under various scenarios. Experiments across diverse types and degrees demonstrate the robustness of our approach and further validate its effectiveness on downstream tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/Zihang- Chen/HiDRA.