Hierarchical Patch Aggregation Transformer for Motion Deblurring

The encoder-decoder framework based on Transformer components has become a paradigm in the field of image deblurring architecture design. In this paper, we critically revisit this approach and find that many current architectures severely focus on limited local regions during the feature extraction stage. These designs compromise the feature richness and diversity of the encoder-decoder framework, leading to bottlenecks in performance improvement. To address these deficiencies, a novel Hierarchical Patch Aggregation Transformer architecture (HPAT) is proposed. In the initial feature extraction stage, HPAT combines Axis-Selective Transformer Blocks with linear complexity and is supplemented by an adaptive hierarchical attention fusion mechanism. These mechanisms enable the model to effectively capture the spatial relationships between features and integrate features from different hierarchical levels. Then, we redesign the feedforward network of the Transformer block in the encoder-decoder structure and propose the Fused Feedforward Network. This effective aggregation enhances the ability to capture and retain local detailed features. We evaluate HPAT through extensive experiments and compare its performance with baseline methods on public datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed HPAT model achieves state-of-the-art performance in image deblurring tasks.