Kernel Adaptive Swin Transformer for Image Restoration
Zhen Ni, Jingyu Wang, Aniruddha Bhattacharjya, Le Yan · Symmetry · 2025
In this modern era, attention has been devoted to blind super-resolution design, which improves image restoration performance by combining self-attention networks and explicitly introducing degradation information. This paper proposes a novel model called Kernel Adaptive Swin Transformer (KAST) to address the ill-posedness in image super-resolution and the resulting irregular difficulties in restoration, including asymmetrical degradation problems. KAST introduces four key innovations: (1) local degradation-aware modeling, (2) parallel attention-based feature fusion, (3) log-space continuous position bias, and (4) comprehensive validation on diverse datasets. The model captures degraded information in different regions of low-resolution images, effectively encodes and distinguishes these degraded features using self-attention mechanisms, and accurately restores image details. The proposed approach innovatively integrates degraded features with image features through a parallel attention fusion strategy, enhancing the network’s ability to capture pixel relationships and achieving denoising, deblurring, and high-resolution image reconstruction. Experimental results demonstrate that our model performs well on multiple datasets, effectively verifying the effectiveness of the proposed method.