Cheng Yang

Chun Bao, Jie Cao, Yaqian Ning et al.

Extensive research works demonstrate that the attention mechanism in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) effectively improves accuracy. Nevertheless, few works design attention mechanisms using large receptive fields. In this work, we propose a novel attention method named Rega-net to increase CNN accuracy by enlarging the receptive field. Inspired by the mechanism of the human retina, we design convolutional kernels to resemble the non-uniformly distributed structure of the human retina. Then, we sample variable-resolution values in the Gabor function distribution and fill these values in retina-like kernels. This distribution allows essential features to be more visible in the center position of the receptive field. We further design an attention module including these retina-like kernels. Experiments demonstrate that our Rega-Net achieves 79.96% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K classification and 43.1% mAP on COCO2017 object detection. The mAP of the Rega-Net increased by up to 3.5% compared to baseline networks.

Cheng Yang, Lijing Liang, Zhixun Su

This paper proposes ControlMambaIR, a novel image restoration method designed to address perceptual challenges in image deraining, deblurring, and denoising tasks. By integrating the Mamba network architecture with the diffusion model, the condition network achieves refined conditional control, thereby enhancing the control and optimization of the image generation process. To evaluate the robustness and generalization capability of our method across various image degradation conditions, extensive experiments were conducted on several benchmark datasets, including Rain100H, Rain100L, GoPro, and SSID. The results demonstrate that our proposed approach consistently surpasses existing methods in perceptual quality metrics, such as LPIPS and FID, while maintaining comparable performance in image distortion metrics, including PSNR and SSIM, highlighting its effectiveness and adaptability. Notably, ablation experiments reveal that directly noise prediction in the diffusion process achieves better performance, effectively balancing noise suppression and detail preservation. Furthermore, the findings indicate that the Mamba architecture is particularly well-suited as a conditional control network for diffusion models, outperforming both CNN- and Attention-based approaches in this context. Overall, these results highlight the flexibility and effectiveness of ControlMambaIR in addressing a range of image restoration perceptual challenges.

Cheng Yang, Lijing Liang, Zhixun Su

Real-world image denoising is an extremely important image processing problem, which aims to recover clean images from noisy images captured in natural environments. In recent years, diffusion models have achieved very promising results in the field of image generation, outperforming previous generation models. However, it has not been widely used in the field of image denoising because it is difficult to control the appropriate position of the added noise. Inspired by diffusion models, this paper proposes a novel general denoising diffusion model that can be used for real-world image denoising. We introduce a diffusion process with linear interpolation, and the intermediate noisy image is interpolated from the original clean image and the corresponding real-world noisy image, so that this diffusion model can handle the level of added noise. In particular, we also introduce two sampling algorithms for this diffusion model. The first one is a simple sampling procedure defined according to the diffusion process, and the second one targets the problem of the first one and makes a number of improvements. Our experimental results show that our proposed method with a simple CNNs Unet achieves comparable results compared to the Transformer architecture. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluations on real-world denoising benchmarks show that the proposed general diffusion model performs almost as well as against the state-of-the-art methods.