  In this work, we utilize the high-fidelity generation abilities of diffusion
models to solve blind JPEG restoration at high compression levels. We propose
an elegant modification of the forward stochastic differential equation of
diffusion models to adapt them to this restoration task and name our method
DriftRec. Comparing DriftRec against an $L_2$ regression baseline with the same
network architecture and state-of-the-art techniques for JPEG restoration, we
show that our approach can escape the tendency of other methods to generate
blurry images, and recovers the distribution of clean images significantly more
faithfully. For this, only a dataset of clean/corrupted image pairs and no
knowledge about the corruption operation is required, enabling wider
applicability to other restoration tasks. In contrast to other conditional and
unconditional diffusion models, we utilize the idea that the distributions of
clean and corrupted images are much closer to each other than each is to the
usual Gaussian prior of the reverse process in diffusion models. Our approach
therefore requires only low levels of added noise and needs comparatively few
sampling steps even without further optimizations. We show that DriftRec
naturally generalizes to realistic and difficult scenarios such as unaligned
double JPEG compression and blind restoration of JPEGs found online, without
having encountered such examples during training.
