Flow-Guided Sparse Transformer for Video Deblurring

Exploiting similar and sharper scene patches in spatio-temporal neighborhoods is critical for video deblurring. However, CNN-based methods show limitations in capturing long-range dependencies and modeling non-local self-similarity. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, Flow-Guided Sparse Transformer (FGST), for video deblurring. In FGST, we customize a self-attention module, Flow-Guided Sparse Window-based Multi-head Self-Attention (FGSW-MSA). For each query element on the blurry reference frame, FGSW-MSA enjoys the guidance of the estimated optical flow to globally sample spatially sparse yet highly related key elements corresponding to the same scene patch in neighboring frames. Besides, we present a Recurrent Embedding (RE) mechanism to transfer information from past frames and strengthen long-range temporal dependencies. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed FGST outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on both DVD and GOPRO datasets and even yields more visually pleasing results in real video deblurring. Code and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/linjing7/VR-Baseline