# HINet: Half Instance Normalization Network for Image Restoration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.06086 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06086/

## Key facts

- Cited by 237 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 50 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02921/) (2017)
- [Group Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08494/) (2018)
- [Beyond a Gaussian Denoiser: Residual Learning of Deep CNN for Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03981/) (2016)
- [ShuffleNet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01083/) (2017)
- [Instance Normalization: The Missing Ingredient for Fast Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08022/) (2016)
- [ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11164/) (2018)
- [Multi-Stage Progressive Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02808/) (2021)
- [Deep Multi-scale Convolutional Neural Network for Dynamic Scene Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02177/) (2016)
- [DeblurGAN: Blind Motion Deblurring Using Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07064/) (2017)
- [Two at Once: Enhancing Learning and Generalization Capacities via IBN-Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09441/) (2018)
- [DeblurGAN-v2: Deblurring (Orders-of-Magnitude) Faster and Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03826/) (2019)
- [Deep Joint Rain Detection and Removal from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07769/) (2016)
- [Scale-recurrent Network for Deep Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01770/) (2018)
- [Context Encoding for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08904/) (2018)
- [Toward Convolutional Blind Denoising of Real Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04686/) (2018)
- [Progressive Image Deraining Networks: A Better and Simpler Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09221/) (2019)
- [Multi-Scale Progressive Fusion Network for Single Image Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10985/) (2020)
- [Density-aware Single Image De-raining using a Multi-stream Dense Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07412/) (2018)
- [Improved Texture Networks: Maximizing Quality and Diversity in Feed-forward Stylization and Texture Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.02096/) (2017)
- [CycleISP: Real Image Restoration via Improved Data Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07761/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 237)

- [Simple Baselines for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04676/) (2022)
- [MAXIM: Multi-Axis MLP for Image Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02973/) (2022)
- [Deblurring via Stochastic Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02475/) (2021)
- [Inversion by Direct Iteration: An Alternative to Denoising Diffusion for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11435/) (2023)
- [InstructIR: High-Quality Image Restoration Following Human Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16468/) (2024)
- [Event-Based Fusion for Motion Deblurring with Cross-modal Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00167/) (2021)
- [AdaIR: Adaptive All-in-One Image Restoration via Frequency Mining and Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14614/) (2024)
- [VmambaIR: Visual State Space Model for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11423/) (2024)
- [Hierarchical Integration Diffusion Model for Realistic Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12966/) (2023)
- [Embedding Fourier for Ultra-High-Definition Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11831/) (2023)
- [Refusion: Enabling Large-Size Realistic Image Restoration with Latent-Space Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08291/) (2023)
- [Intriguing Findings of Frequency Selection for Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11745/) (2021)
- [Multiscale Structure Guided Diffusion for Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01789/) (2022)
- [Pan-Mamba: Effective pan-sharpening with State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12192/) (2024)
- [Selective Hourglass Mapping for Universal Image Restoration Based on Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11157/) (2024)
- [MST++: Multi-stage Spectral-wise Transformer for Efficient Spectral Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07908/) (2022)
- [Improving Image Restoration by Revisiting Global Information Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04491/) (2021)
- [A Comparative Study of Image Restoration Networks for General Backbone Network Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11881/) (2023)
- [Flare7K: A Phenomenological Nighttime Flare Removal Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06570/) (2022)
- [Sparse Sampling Transformer with Uncertainty-Driven Ranking for Unified Removal of Raindrops and Rain Streaks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14153/) (2023)
- [Prompt-In-Prompt Learning for Universal Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05038/) (2023)
- [Toward Real-world Single Image Deraining: A New Benchmark and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05514/) (2022)
- [U-shaped Vision Mamba for Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04139/) (2024)
- [DocDiff: Document Enhancement via Residual Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03892/) (2023)
- [Language-driven All-in-one Adverse Weather Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01381/) (2023)
- [Improving Image Restoration through Removing Degradations in Textual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17334/) (2023)
- [RobustSAM: Segment Anything Robustly on Degraded Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09627/) (2024)
- [Learning Degradation Representations for Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05244/) (2022)
- [Towards Unified Deep Image Deraining: A Survey and A New Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03535/) (2023)
- [FourierMamba: Fourier Learning Integration with State Space Models for Image Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19450/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we explore the role of Instance Normalization in low-level vision tasks. Specifically, we present a novel block: Half Instance Normalization Block (HIN Block), to boost the performance of image restoration networks. Based on HIN Block, we design a simple and powerful multi-stage network named HINet, which consists of two subnetworks. With the help of HIN Block, HINet surpasses the state-of-the-art (SOTA) on various image restoration tasks. For image denoising, we exceed it 0.11dB and 0.28 dB in PSNR on SIDD dataset, with only 7.5% and 30% of its multiplier-accumulator operations (MACs), 6.8 times and 2.9 times speedup respectively. For image deblurring, we get comparable performance with 22.5% of its MACs and 3.3 times speedup on REDS and GoPro datasets. For image deraining, we exceed it by 0.3 dB in PSNR on the average result of multiple datasets with 1.4 times speedup. With HINet, we won 1st place on the NTIRE 2021 Image Deblurring Challenge - Track2. JPEG Artifacts, with a PSNR of 29.70. The code is available at https://github.com/megvii-model/HINet.