Spatial relaxation transformer for image super-resolution

Abstract

Transformer-based approaches have demonstrated remarkable performance in image processing tasks due to their ability to model long-range dependencies. Current mainstream Transformer-based methods typically confine self-attention computation within windows to reduce computational burden. However, this constraint may lead to grid artifacts in the reconstructed images due to insufficient cross-window information exchange, particularly in image super-resolution tasks. To address this issue, we propose the Multi-Scale Texture Complementation Block based on Spatial Relaxation Transformer (MSRT), which leverages features at multiple scales and augments information exchange through cross windows attention computation. In addition, we introduce a loss function based on the prior of texture smoothness transformation, which utilizes the continuity of textures between patches to constrain the generation of more coherent texture information in the reconstructed images. Specifically, we employ learnable compressive sensing technology to extract shallow features from images, preserving image features while reducing feature dimensions and improving computational efficiency. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations.