2024/11/27 by Yawei Li, Bin Ren, Li, Yawei +13 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Advanced Image Processing Techniques #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Image and Signal Denoising Methods #Medical Image Segmentation Techniques
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2411.18588
openalex publication_date 2024/11/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
While vision transformers show promise in numerous image restoration (IR) tasks, the challenge remains in efficiently generalizing and scaling up a model for multiple IR tasks. To strike a balance between efficiency and model capacity for a generalized transformer-based IR method, we propose a hierarchical information flow mechanism for image restoration, dubbed Hi-IR, which progressively propagates information among pixels in a bottom-up manner. Hi-IR constructs a hierarchical information tree representing the degraded image across three levels. Each level encapsulates different types of information, with higher levels encompassing broader objects and concepts and lower levels focusing on local details. Moreover, the hierarchical tree architecture removes long-range self-attention, improves the computational efficiency and memory utilization, thus preparing it for effective model scaling. Based on that, we explore model scaling to improve our method's capabilities, which is expected to positively impact IR in large-scale training settings. Extensive experimental results show that Hi-IR achieves state-of-the-art performance in seven common image restoration tasks, affirming its effectiveness and generalizability.