Concatenated Attention Neural Network for Image Restoration
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Research Center on Fictitious Economy and Data Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院虚拟经济与数据科学研究中心）；Key Laboratory of Big Data Mining and Knowledge Management Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大数据挖掘与知识管理重点实验室）
In this paper, we present a general framework for low-level vision tasks including image compression artifacts reduction and image denoising. Under this framework, a novel concatenated attention neural network (CANet) is specifically designed for image restoration. The main contributions of this paper are as follows: First, by applying concise but effective concatenation and feature selection mechanism, we establish a novel connection mechanism which connect different modules in the modules stacking network. Second, both pixel-wise and channel-wise attention mechanisms are used in each module convolution layer, which promotes further extraction of more essential information in images. Lastly, we demonstrate that CANet achieves better results than previous state-of-the-art approaches with sufficient experiments in compression artifacts removing and image denoising.
Data61-Commonwealth Scientific Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO)（Data61-联邦科学与工业研究组织）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）
Deep convolutional neural networks perform better on images containing spatially invariant degradations, also known as synthetic degradations; however, their performance is limited on real-degraded photographs and requires multiple-stage network modeling. To advance the practicability of restoration algorithms, this paper proposes a novel single-stage blind real image restoration network (R$^2$Net) by employing a modular architecture. We use a residual on the residual structure to ease the flow of low-frequency information and apply feature attention to exploit the channel dependencies. Furthe…
UIUC（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Northeastern University（东北大学）；Google Brain（谷歌大脑）；ByteDance AI Lab（字节跳动人工智能实验室）；University of Oregon（俄勒冈大学）
Self-similarity refers to the image prior widely used in image restoration algorithms that small but similar patterns tend to occur at different locations and scales. However, recent advanced deep convolutional neural network based methods for image restoration do not take full advantage of self-similarities by relying on self-attention neural modules that only process information at the same scale. To solve this problem, we present a novel Pyramid Attention module for image restoration, which captures long-range feature correspondences from a multi-scale feature pyramid. Inspired by the fact …
HDR is an important part of computational photography technology. In this paper, we propose a lightweight neural network called Efficient Attention-and-alignment-guided Progressive Network (EAPNet) for the challenge NTIRE 2022 HDR Track 1 and Track 2. We introduce a multi-dimensional lightweight encoding module to extract features. Besides, we propose Progressive Dilated U-shape Block (PDUB) that can be a progressive plug-and-play module for dynamically tuning MAccs and PSNR. Finally, we use fast and low-power feature-align module to deal with misalignment problem in place of the time-consumin…
Since convolutional neural networks perform well in learning generalizable image priors from large-scale data, these models have been widely used in image denoising tasks. However, the computational complexity increases dramatically as well on complex model. In this paper, We propose a novel lightweight Complementary Attention Module, which includes a density module and a sparse module, which can cooperatively mine dense and sparse features for feature complementary learning to build an efficient lightweight architecture. Moreover, to reduce the loss of details caused by denoising, this paper …
Recently, deep convolutional neural network (CNN) have been widely used in image restoration and obtained great success. However, most of existing methods are limited to local receptive field and equal treatment of different types of information. Besides, existing methods always use a multi-supervised method to aggregate different feature maps, which can not effectively aggregate hierarchical feature information. To address these issues, we propose an attention cube network (A-CubeNet) for image restoration for more powerful feature expression and feature correlation learning. Specifically, we…
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）
Recently, very deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been attracting considerable attention in image restoration. However, as the depth grows, the long-term dependency problem is rarely realized for these very deep models, which results in the prior states/layers having little influence on the subsequent ones. Motivated by the fact that human thoughts have persistency, we propose a very deep persistent memory network (MemNet) that introduces a memory block, consisting of a recursive unit and a gate unit, to explicitly mine persistent memory through an adaptive learning process. The re…
How Powerful Potential of Attention on Image Restoration?
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）
Enhancing Image Restoration Transformer via Adaptive Translation Equivariance
Institute of Medical Technology, Peking University Health Science Center, Peking University（北京大学医学部医学技术研究所）；Biomedical Engineering Department, College of Future Technology, Peking University（未来技术学院生物医学工程系）；National Biomedical Imaging Center, Peking University（北京大学国家生物医学成像中心）；China Mobile Research Institute（中国移动研究院）
ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Meta Inc.（Meta公司）；University of Wurzburg（维尔茨堡大学）
Video restoration aims at restoring multiple high-quality frames from multiple low-quality frames. Existing video restoration methods generally fall into two extreme cases, i.e., they either restore all frames in parallel or restore the video frame by frame in a recurrent way, which would result in different merits and drawbacks. Typically, the former has the advantage of temporal information fusion. However, it suffers from large model size and intensive memory consumption; the latter has a relatively small model size as it shares parameters across frames; however, it lacks long-range depende…
In this paper, we propose a residual non-local attention network for high-quality image restoration. Without considering the uneven distribution of information in the corrupted images, previous methods are restricted by local convolutional operation and equal treatment of spatial- and channel-wise features. To address this issue, we design local and non-local attention blocks to extract features that capture the long-range dependencies between pixels and pay more attention to the challenging parts. Specifically, we design trunk branch and (non-)local mask branch in each (non-)local attention b…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Westlake University（西湖大学）
Recently, Transformer-based image restoration networks have achieved promising improvements over convolutional neural networks due to parameter-independent global interactions. To lower computational cost, existing works generally limit self-attention computation within non-overlapping windows. However, each group of tokens are always from a dense area of the image. This is considered as a dense attention strategy since the interactions of tokens are restrained in dense regions. Obviously, this strategy could result in restricted receptive fields. To address this issue, we propose Attention Re…
Segmentation Guided Sparse Transformer for Under-Display Camera Image Restoration
Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学深圳校区）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University（南京大学计算机软件新技术国家重点实验室）；Samsung Research China - Beijing (SRC-B)（三星中国研究院北京分部）；Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学深圳校区）；SAMSUNG Electronics（三星电子）
Beijing University of Technology（北京工业大学）；Beijing Key Laboratory of Computational Intelligence and Intelligent System（计算智能与智能系统北京市重点实验室）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
Dynamic scene deblurring is a challenging problem in computer vision. It is difficult to accurately estimate the spatially varying blur kernel by traditional methods. Data-driven-based methods usually employ kernel-free end-to-end mapping schemes, which are apt to overlook the kernel estimation. To address this issue, we propose a blur-attention module to dynamically capture the spatially varying features of non-uniform blurred images. The module consists of a DenseBlock unit and a spatial attention unit with multi-pooling feature fusion, which can effectively extract complex spatially varying…
Hong Kong Baptist University（香港浸会大学）；Institute of High Performance Computing, A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局高性能计算研究院）；vivo Mobile Communication Co. Ltd（维沃移动通信有限公司）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging via multi-exposure fusion is an important task for most modern imaging platforms. In spite of recent developments in both hardware and algorithm innovations, challenges remain over content association ambiguities caused by saturation, motion, and various artifacts introduced during multi-exposure fusion such as ghosting, noise, and blur. In this work, we propose an Attention-guided Progressive Neural Texture Fusion (APNT-Fusion) HDR restoration model which aims to address these issues within one framework. An efficient two-stream structure is proposed which sep…
Recently, image restoration transformers have achieved comparable performance with previous state-of-the-art CNNs. However, how to efficiently leverage such architectures remains an open problem. In this work, we present Dual-former whose critical insight is to combine the powerful global modeling ability of self-attention modules and the local modeling ability of convolutions in an overall architecture. With convolution-based Local Feature Extraction modules equipped in the encoder and the decoder, we only adopt a novel Hybrid Transformer Block in the latent layer to model the long-distance d…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Westlake University（西湖大学）
Recently, Transformer architecture has been introduced into image restoration to replace convolution neural network (CNN) with surprising results. Considering the high computational complexity of Transformer with global attention, some methods use the local square window to limit the scope of self-attention. However, these methods lack direct interaction among different windows, which limits the establishment of long-range dependencies. To address the above issue, we propose a new image restoration model, Cross Aggregation Transformer (CAT). The core of our CAT is the Rectangle-Window Self-Att…
School of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School（北京大学深圳研究生院电子与计算机工程学院）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Center for Biomedical Image Computing & Analytics, University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学生物医学图像计算与分析中心）
Local and non-local attention-based methods have been well studied in various image restoration tasks while leading to promising performance. However, most of the existing methods solely focus on one type of attention mechanism (local or non-local). Furthermore, by exploiting the self-similarity of natural images, existing pixel-wise non-local attention operations tend to give rise to deviations in the process of characterizing long-range dependence due to image degeneration. To overcome these problems, in this paper we propose a novel collaborative attention network (COLA-Net) for image resto…
Joint multi-dimensional dynamic attention and transformer for general image restoration
School of Information Engineering, Guangdong University of Technology（广东工业大学信息工程学院）；Key Laboratory of Photonic Technology for Integrated Sensing and Communication, Ministry of Education（教育部光子技术集成感知与通信重点实验室）；Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Information Photonics Technology（广东省信息光子技术重点实验室）；Institute of Advanced Photonics Technology, School of Information Engineering, Guangdong University of Technology（广东工业大学信息工程学院先进光子技术研究所）；School of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学电子与通信工程学院）
ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Meta Inc.（Meta公司）；KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）
Video restoration (e.g., video super-resolution) aims to restore high-quality frames from low-quality frames. Different from single image restoration, video restoration generally requires to utilize temporal information from multiple adjacent but usually misaligned video frames. Existing deep methods generally tackle with this by exploiting a sliding window strategy or a recurrent architecture, which either is restricted by frame-by-frame restoration or lacks long-range modelling ability. In this paper, we propose a Video Restoration Transformer (VRT) with parallel frame prediction and long-ra…
DSwinIR: Rethinking Window-based Attention for Image Restoration
School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology（计算机科学与技术学院，哈尔滨工业大学）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（计算机科学与技术学院，哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））
A Comparative Study of NAFNet Baselines for Image Restoration
Department of Computer Science, Georgia State University（计算机科学系，佐治亚州立大学）；Center for Translational Research in Neuroimaging and Data Science (TReNDS)（神经影像与数据科学转化研究中心）；Georgia State University（佐治亚州立大学）
UESTC（电子科技大学）；Northeastern University（东北大学）；Sichuan University of Science and Engineering（四川轻化工大学）
Most current image super-resolution (SR) methods based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) use residual learning in network structural design, which favors to effective back propagation and hence improves SR performance by increasing model scale. However, residual networks suffer from representational redundancy by introducing identity paths that impede the full exploitation of model capacity. Besides, blindly enlarging network scale can cause more problems in model training, even with residual learning. In this paper, a novel fully channel-concatenated network (FC$^2$N) is presented to ma…
University of Pisa（比萨大学）；University of Trento（特伦托大学）；ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Meta Reality Labs（元宇宙现实实验室）；Peking University（北京大学）；University of Modena and Reggio Emilia（摩德纳大学与雷焦艾米利亚大学）
HAT: Hybrid Attention Transformer for Image Restoration
State Key Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart City, University of Macau（澳门大学物联网智能城市国家重点实验室）；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；ARC Lab, Tencent PCG（腾讯PCG ARC实验室）
Intra and Inter Parser-Prompted Transformers for Effective Image Restoration
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Centre for Advances in Reliability and Safety（可靠性与安全先进中心）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）
Tohoku University（东北大学）；RIKEN Center for AIP（理化学研究所AIP中心）
Many studies have been conducted so far on image restoration, the problem of restoring a clean image from its distorted version. There are many different types of distortion which affect image quality. Previous studies have focused on single types of distortion, proposing methods for removing them. However, image quality degrades due to multiple factors in the real world. Thus, depending on applications, e.g., vision for autonomous cars or surveillance cameras, we need to be able to deal with multiple combined distortions with unknown mixture ratios. For this purpose, we propose a simple yet e…
AgileIR: Memory-Efficient Group Shifted Windows Attention for Agile Image Restoration
Faculty of Computer Science；Information Technology University of Malaya Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia；School of Intelligence Science；Technology University of Science；Faculty of Art；Design Fuzhou University of International Studies
Image denoising is still a challenging issue in many computer vision sub-domains. Recent studies show that significant improvements are made possible in a supervised setting. However, few challenges, such as spatial fidelity and cartoon-like smoothing remain unresolved or decisively overlooked. Our study proposes a simple yet efficient architecture for the denoising problem that addresses the aforementioned issues. The proposed architecture revisits the concept of modular concatenation instead of long and deeper cascaded connections, to recover a cleaner approximation of the given image. We fi…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
We propose a novel zero-shot multi-frame image restoration method for removing unwanted obstruction elements (such as rains, snow, and moire patterns) that vary in successive frames. It has three stages: transformer pre-training, zero-shot restoration, and hard patch refinement. Using the pre-trained transformers, our model is able to tell the motion difference between the true image information and the obstructing elements. For zero-shot image restoration, we design a novel model, termed SiamTrans, which is constructed by Siamese transformers, encoders, and decoders. Each transformer has a te…
Due to various and complicated snow degradations, single image desnowing is a challenging image restoration task. As prior arts can not handle it ideally, we propose a novel transformer, SnowFormer, which explores efficient cross-attentions to build local-global context interaction across patches and surpasses existing works that employ local operators or vanilla transformers. Compared to prior desnowing methods and universal image restoration methods, SnowFormer has several benefits. Firstly, unlike the multi-head self-attention in recent image restoration Vision Transformers, SnowFormer inco…
Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Recently, convolutional neural network (CNN) has demonstrated significant success for image restoration (IR) tasks (e.g., image super-resolution, image deblurring, rain streak removal, and dehazing). However, existing CNN based models are commonly implemented as a single-path stream to enrich feature representations from low-quality (LQ) input space for final predictions, which fail to fully incorporate preceding low-level contexts into later high-level features within networks, thereby producing inferior results. In this paper, we present a deep interleaved network (DIN) that learns how infor…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）
Video restoration tasks, including super-resolution, deblurring, etc, are drawing increasing attention in the computer vision community. A challenging benchmark named REDS is released in the NTIRE19 Challenge. This new benchmark challenges existing methods from two aspects: (1) how to align multiple frames given large motions, and (2) how to effectively fuse different frames with diverse motion and blur. In this work, we propose a novel Video Restoration framework with Enhanced Deformable networks, termed EDVR, to address these challenges. First, to handle large motions, we devise a Pyramid, C…
Deep learning networks are being developed in every stage of the MRI workflow and have provided state-of-the-art results. However, this has come at the cost of increased computation requirement and storage. Hence, replacing the networks with compact models at various stages in the MRI workflow can significantly reduce the required storage space and provide considerable speedup. In computer vision, knowledge distillation is a commonly used method for model compression. In our work, we propose a knowledge distillation (KD) framework for the image to image problems in the MRI workflow in order to…
ATD: Improved Transformer with Adaptive Token Dictionary for Image Restoration
School of Computer Science and Engineering (School of Cyber Security), University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC)（计算机科学与工程学院（网络安全学院），电子科学与技术大学（UESTC））
