TriFormer: Triple Branch Heterogeneous Transformers for UHD Image Restoration

Abstract

Ultra-high-definition (UHD) image restoration is becoming a critical research area due to the increasing demand for high-quality visual content in various applications, including autonomous driving, remote sensing, digital entertainment, etc. However, UHD image restoration tasks present notable challenges, including the significant computational burden posed by the large image size scale, the difficulty in preserving fine details and textures, and the increased susceptibility to noise and artifacts during the restoration process. In this paper, we propose a novel triple-branched optimized heterogeneous transformer for UHD image restoration, named TriFormer. Specifically, our method embeds a high-resolution CNN branch for high-frequency features, a low-resolution pixel-wise attention branch for low-frequency features, and a channel-wise attention branch for feature fusion. We perform experiments across two UHD image restoration tasks: enhancing low-light images and deblurring. Results demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches both quantitatively and qualitatively. The code will be made available at https://github.com/Chloe-mxxxxc/TRIFORMER.