A Novel Single-Stage Network for Image Restoration

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Abstract: * Image restoration is the task of aiming to obtain the high quality image from a corrupt input image, such as deblurring and deraining. In the process of image restoration, it is typically necessary to maintain a complex balance between spatial details and contextual information. Although multi-stage network can optimally balance these competing goals and achieve significant performance, this also increases the complexity of the system. In this paper, we propose a mountain shaped single-stage design base on a simple UNet architecture, which removes or replaces unnecessary nonlinear activation functions to achieve the above balance with low system complexity. Specifically, we propose a feature fusion middleware (FFM) mechanism as an information exchange component between the encoder-decoder architectural levels. It seamlessly integrates upper layer information into the adjacent lower layer, proceeding sequentially down to the lowest layer. Finally, all information is fused into the original image resolution manipulation level. This preserves spatial details and integrates contextual information, ensuring high quality image restoration. In addition, we propose a multi-head attention middle block (MHAMB) as a bridge between the encoder and decoder to capture more global information and surpass the limitations of the receptive field of CNNs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach, named as M3SNet, outperforms previous state-of-the-art models while using less than half the computational costs, for several image restoration tasks, such as image deraining and deblurring.*

Network Architecture

Overall Framework of M3SNet

(a) Feature fusion midddleware (FFM) that enables the exchange of information across multiple scales while preserving the fine details. (b) The architecture of nonlinear activation free block (NAFBlock). (c) Simplified Channel Attention (SCA). (d) Multi-head attention middle block (MHAMB) that capture more global information.

Installation

The model is built in PyTorch 1.1.0 and tested on Ubuntu 16.04 environment (Python3.7, CUDA9.0, cuDNN7.5).

For installing, follow these intructions

conda create -n pytorch1 python=3.7
conda activate pytorch1
conda install pytorch=1.1 torchvision=0.3 cudatoolkit=9.0 -c pytorch
pip install matplotlib scikit-image opencv-python yacs joblib natsort h5py tqdm

Install warmup scheduler

cd pytorch-gradual-warmup-lr; python setup.py install; cd ..

Quick Run

To test the pre-trained models of pre-trained

Training and Evaluation

Training and Testing codes for deblurring and deraining are provided in their respective directories.

Citations

If our code helps your research or work, please consider citing our paper. The following is a BibTeX reference:

@article{Gao2023AMS,
  title={A Novel  Single-Stage Network for Accurate Image Restoration},
  author={Hu Gao and Jing Yang and Ying Zhang and Ning Wang and Jingfan Yang and Depeng Dang},
  journal={The Visual Computer},
  year={2024}
}

Contact

Should you have any question, please contact [email protected]