Bridging CNN and Transformer in Image Denoising

The source code will be coming...

Introduction

In this paper, we proposed CTHNet for image restoration, which is a hybrid network with CNNs and Transformer. Specifically, our CTHNet includes CNN units and Transformer units. During the denoising processing, the two kinds of units can exchange information. Benefiting from the locality of CNN, we employ series of channel attention blocks (CABs) in each CNN unit to retain spatial details in images. In the Transformer unit, we build a multi-scale transformer that utilizes the feature map with different scales to capture long-range dependencies. It is noted that each downsampled feature map will be restored to its original size and our Transformer unit utilizes lots of skip connections, these are effective ways to reduce information loss caused by continuous downsampling operation. Moreover, we design a mutual-learning mechanism to improve the mutual learning ability of Transformer and CNN.