When Fast Fourier Transform Meets Transformer for Image Restoration

Natural images can suffer from various degradation phenomena caused by adverse atmospheric conditions or unique degradation mechanism. Such diversity makes it challenging to design a universal framework for kinds of restoration tasks. Instead of exploring the commonality across different degradation phenomena, existing image restoration methods focus on the modification of network architecture under limited restoration priors. In this work, we first review various degradation phenomena from a frequency perspective as prior. Based on this, we propose an efficient image restoration framework, dubbed SFHformer, which incorporates the Fast Fourier Transform mechanism into Transformer architecture. Specifically, we design a dual domain hybrid structure for multi-scale receptive fields modeling, in which the spatial domain and the frequency domain focuses on local modeling and global modeling, respectively. Moreover, we design unique positional coding and frequency dynamic convolution for each frequency component to extract rich frequency-domain features. Extensive experiments on twenty-three restoration datasets for a range of eight restoration tasks such as deraining, dehazing, deblurring, desnowing and underwater/low-light enhancement, demonstrate that our SFHformer surpasses the state-of-the-art approaches and achieves a favorable trade-off between performance, parameter size and computational cost. We will release the code after acceptance.