mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Multi-Stage Progressive Image Restoration

arXiv 2102.02808 ↗First posted 4 Feb 2021cs.CVcited by 813

Not on the map. Why?

Cited by 90 in Diffusion models, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

Image restoration tasks demand a complex balance between spatial details and high-level contextualized information while recovering images. In this paper, we propose a novel synergistic design that can optimally balance these competing goals. Our main proposal is a multi-stage architecture, that progressively learns restoration functions for the degraded inputs, thereby breaking down the overall recovery process into more manageable steps. Specifically, our model first learns the contextualized features using encoder-decoder architectures and later combines them with a high-resolution branch that retains local information. At each stage, we introduce a novel per-pixel adaptive design that leverages in-situ supervised attention to reweight the local features. A key ingredient in such a multi-stage architecture is the information exchange between different stages. To this end, we propose a two-faceted approach where the information is not only exchanged sequentially from early to late stages, but lateral connections between feature processing blocks also exist to avoid any loss of information. The resulting tightly interlinked multi-stage architecture, named as MPRNet, delivers strong performance gains on ten datasets across a range of tasks including image deraining, deblurring, and denoising. The source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/swz30/MPRNet.

Key facts. Cited by 813 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 62 of its 99 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 4 Feb 2021.

Builds on

62 of 99 references.

References · 62

  1. 2015Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognitioncited by 51,809
  2. 2014Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimizationcited by 36,960
  3. 2015U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentationcited by 19,604
  4. 2016Densely Connected Convolutional Networkscited by 6,691
  5. 2016SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restartscited by 4,993
  6. 2017Squeeze-and-Excitation Networkscited by 4,763
  7. 2018CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Modulecited by 2,463
  8. 2017Non-local Neural Networkscited by 2,290
  9. 2016Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Networkcited by 1,898
  10. 2016Beyond a Gaussian Denoiser: Residual Learning of Deep CNN for Image Denoisingcited by 1,352
  11. 2018Image Super-Resolution Using Very Deep Residual Channel Attention Networkscited by 1,256
  12. 2018ESRGAN: Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networkscited by 1,250
38 more
  1. 2014Image Super-Resolution Using Deep Convolutional Networkscited by 1,218
  2. 2015Multi-Scale Context Aggregation by Dilated Convolutionscited by 1,128
  3. 2018Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentationcited by 1,001
  4. 2016Stacked Hourglass Networks for Human Pose Estimationcited by 913
  5. 2016Deep Multi-scale Convolutional Neural Network for Dynamic Scene Deblurringcited by 722
  6. 2018CCNet: Criss-Cross Attention for Semantic Segmentationcited by 717
  7. 2018Learning to See in the Darkcited by 459
  8. 2017Learning Deep CNN Denoiser Prior for Image Restorationcited by 407
  9. 2019MS-TCN: Multi-Stage Temporal Convolutional Network for Action Segmentationcited by 370
  10. 2017DeblurGAN: Blind Motion Deblurring Using Conditional Adversarial Networkscited by 366
  11. 2019DeblurGAN-v2: Deblurring (Orders-of-Magnitude) Faster and Bettercited by 361
  12. 2016Deep Joint Rain Detection and Removal from a Single Imagecited by 351
  13. 2017Cascaded Pyramid Network for Multi-Person Pose Estimationcited by 341
  14. 2018Scale-recurrent Network for Deep Image Deblurringcited by 332
  15. 2020Learning Enriched Features for Real Image Restoration and Enhancementcited by 311
  16. 2018Toward Convolutional Blind Denoising of Real Photographscited by 274
  17. 2019Progressive Image Deraining Networks: A Better and Simpler Baselinecited by 271
  18. 2020Multi-Scale Progressive Fusion Network for Single Image Derainingcited by 259
  19. 2018Unprocessing Images for Learned Raw Denoisingcited by 250
  20. 2018Density-aware Single Image De-raining using a Multi-stream Dense Networkcited by 248
  21. 2019Residual Non-local Attention Networks for Image Restorationcited by 236
  22. 2020Exploiting Deep Generative Prior for Versatile Image Restoration and Manipulationcited by 225
  23. 2020CycleISP: Real Image Restoration via Improved Data Synthesiscited by 212
  24. 2017Benchmarking Denoising Algorithms with Real Photographscited by 209
  25. 2018Recurrent Squeeze-and-Excitation Context Aggregation Net for Single Image Derainingcited by 205
  26. 2019Deep Stacked Hierarchical Multi-patch Network for Image Deblurringcited by 205
  27. 2017Attentive Generative Adversarial Network for Raindrop Removal from a Single Imagecited by 204
  28. 2017Image De-raining Using a Conditional Generative Adversarial Networkcited by 197
  29. 2020Deblurring by Realistic Blurringcited by 187
  30. 2018Residual Dense Network for Image Restorationcited by 181
  31. 2015ParseNet: Looking Wider to See Bettercited by 176
  32. 2019Real Image Denoising with Feature Attentioncited by 176
  33. 2020Human-Aware Motion Deblurringcited by 174
  34. 2018Gather-Excite: Exploiting Feature Context in Convolutional Neural Networkscited by 138
  35. 2016Clearing the Skies: A deep network architecture for single-image rain removalcited by 136
  36. 2019Deep Learning on Image Denoising: An overviewcited by 128
  37. 2020Spatially-Attentive Patch-Hierarchical Network for Adaptive Motion Deblurringcited by 119
  38. 2019Uncertainty Guided Multi-Scale Residual Learning-using a Cycle Spinning CNN for Single Image De-Rainingcited by 117

50 most cited of 62 All 62 (JSON)

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 44; 2022: 132; 2023: 175; 2024: 204; 2025: 161; 2026: 97.

813 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2021Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restorationcited by 1,618
  2. 2021Uformer: A General U-Shaped Transformer for Image Restorationcited by 864
  3. 2022Simple Baselines for Image Restorationcited by 701
  4. 2024MambaIR: A Simple Baseline for Image Restoration with State-Space Modelcited by 349
  5. 2021Rethinking Coarse-to-Fine Approach in Single Image Deblurringcited by 324
  6. 2022Images Speak in Images: A Generalist Painter for In-Context Visual Learningcited by 317
  7. 2022MAXIM: Multi-Axis MLP for Image Processingcited by 301
  8. 2023DiffIR: Efficient Diffusion Model for Image Restorationcited by 253
  9. 2021Deblurring via Stochastic Refinementcited by 248
  10. 2021TransWeather: Transformer-based Restoration of Images Degraded by Adverse Weather Conditionscited by 243
  11. 2021HINet: Half Instance Normalization Network for Image Restorationcited by 236
  12. 2022VRT: A Video Restoration Transformercited by 219
38 more
  1. 2022Restoring Vision in Adverse Weather Conditions with Patch-Based Denoising Diffusion Modelscited by 215
  2. 2023Learning A Sparse Transformer Network for Effective Image Derainingcited by 204
  3. 2023Image Restoration with Mean-Reverting Stochastic Differential Equationscited by 182
  4. 2021Deblur-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields from Blurry Imagescited by 179
  5. 2024A Survey on Diffusion Models for Inverse Problemscited by 173
  6. 2022Recurrent Video Restoration Transformer with Guided Deformable Attentioncited by 168
  7. 2022Efficient Frequency Domain-based Transformers for High-Quality Image Deblurringcited by 164
  8. 2023Inversion by Direct Iteration: An Alternative to Denoising Diffusion for Image Restorationcited by 164
  9. 2022Learning Enriched Features for Fast Image Restoration and Enhancementcited by 150
  10. 2023Efficient and Explicit Modelling of Image Hierarchies for Image Restorationcited by 145
  11. 2022Stripformer: Strip Transformer for Fast Image Deblurringcited by 139
  12. 2024InstructIR: High-Quality Image Restoration Following Human Instructionscited by 139
  13. 2022Deep Generalized Unfolding Networks for Image Restorationcited by 119
  14. 2022Parallel Diffusion Models of Operator and Image for Blind Inverse Problemscited by 113
  15. 2023PromptIR: Prompting for All-in-One Blind Image Restorationcited by 113
  16. 2021Event-Based Fusion for Motion Deblurring with Cross-modal Attentioncited by 112
  17. 2023Controlling Vision-Language Models for Multi-Task Image Restorationcited by 108
  18. 2024AdaIR: Adaptive All-in-One Image Restoration via Frequency Mining and Modulationcited by 108
  19. 2022LEDNet: Joint Low-light Enhancement and Deblurring in the Darkcited by 95
  20. 2022Cross Aggregation Transformer for Image Restorationcited by 92
  21. 2024OneRestore: A Universal Restoration Framework for Composite Degradationcited by 91
  22. 2024VmambaIR: Visual State Space Model for Image Restorationcited by 90
  23. 2023Hierarchical Integration Diffusion Model for Realistic Image Deblurringcited by 87
  24. 2023Refusion: Enabling Large-Size Realistic Image Restoration with Latent-Space Diffusion Modelscited by 86
  25. 2022Accurate Image Restoration with Attention Retractable Transformercited by 85
  26. 2021Intriguing Findings of Frequency Selection for Image Deblurringcited by 80
  27. 2022BAD-NeRF: Bundle Adjusted Deblur Neural Radiance Fieldscited by 80
  28. 2023ProRes: Exploring Degradation-aware Visual Prompt for Universal Image Restorationcited by 77
  29. 2022Multiscale Structure Guided Diffusion for Image Deblurringcited by 76
  30. 2023Diffusion Models Without Attentioncited by 75
  31. 2024Selective Hourglass Mapping for Universal Image Restoration Based on Diffusion Modelcited by 73
  32. 2024Restoring Images in Adverse Weather Conditions via Histogram Transformercited by 73
  33. 2022MST++: Multi-stage Spectral-wise Transformer for Efficient Spectral Reconstructioncited by 72
  34. 2024Complexity Experts are Task-Discriminative Learners for Any Image Restorationcited by 72
  35. 2023Image Denoising: The Deep Learning Revolution and Beyond -- A Survey Paper --cited by 71
  36. 2022DP-NeRF: Deblurred Neural Radiance Field with Physical Scene Priorscited by 70
  37. 2022A Simple Baseline for Video Restoration with Grouped Spatial-temporal Shiftcited by 68
  38. 2023Residual Denoising Diffusion Modelscited by 68

50 most cited of 813 All 813 (JSON)