CSformer: Bridging Convolution and Transformer for Compressive Sensing
This work addresses the challenge of improving image reconstruction quality in compressive sensing for applications like medical imaging or data compression, though it is incremental as it combines existing CNN and transformer techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of compressive image sensing by proposing CSformer, a hybrid framework that integrates convolutional neural networks and transformers to capture both local and global dependencies, achieving superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods on various datasets.
Convolution neural networks (CNNs) have succeeded in compressive image sensing. However, due to the inductive bias of locality and weight sharing, the convolution operations demonstrate the intrinsic limitations in modeling the long-range dependency. Transformer, designed initially as a sequence-to-sequence model, excels at capturing global contexts due to the self-attention-based architectures even though it may be equipped with limited localization abilities. This paper proposes CSformer, a hybrid framework that integrates the advantages of leveraging both detailed spatial information from CNN and the global context provided by transformer for enhanced representation learning. The proposed approach is an end-to-end compressive image sensing method, composed of adaptive sampling and recovery. In the sampling module, images are measured block-by-block by the learned sampling matrix. In the reconstruction stage, the measurement is projected into dual stems. One is the CNN stem for modeling the neighborhood relationships by convolution, and the other is the transformer stem for adopting global self-attention mechanism. The dual branches structure is concurrent, and the local features and global representations are fused under different resolutions to maximize the complementary of features. Furthermore, we explore a progressive strategy and window-based transformer block to reduce the parameter and computational complexity. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the dedicated transformer-based architecture for compressive sensing, which achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods on different datasets.