CFAT: Unleashing TriangularWindows for Image Super-resolution
This work addresses image quality issues in super-resolution for applications like photography or medical imaging, but it is incremental as it builds on existing transformer methods.
The paper tackled boundary distortion and limited shifting modes in transformer-based image super-resolution by proposing a non-overlapping triangular window technique combined with rectangular windows, resulting in a 0.7 dB performance improvement over state-of-the-art models.
Transformer-based models have revolutionized the field of image super-resolution (SR) by harnessing their inherent ability to capture complex contextual features. The overlapping rectangular shifted window technique used in transformer architecture nowadays is a common practice in super-resolution models to improve the quality and robustness of image upscaling. However, it suffers from distortion at the boundaries and has limited unique shifting modes. To overcome these weaknesses, we propose a non-overlapping triangular window technique that synchronously works with the rectangular one to mitigate boundary-level distortion and allows the model to access more unique sifting modes. In this paper, we propose a Composite Fusion Attention Transformer (CFAT) that incorporates triangular-rectangular window-based local attention with a channel-based global attention technique in image super-resolution. As a result, CFAT enables attention mechanisms to be activated on more image pixels and captures long-range, multi-scale features to improve SR performance. The extensive experimental results and ablation study demonstrate the effectiveness of CFAT in the SR domain. Our proposed model shows a significant 0.7 dB performance improvement over other state-of-the-art SR architectures.