# Stripformer: Strip Transformer for Fast Image Deblurring

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.04627 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04627/

## Key facts

- Cited by 140 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [Pre-Trained Image Processing Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00364/) (2020)
- [Multi-Stage Progressive Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02808/) (2021)
- [Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08318/) (2018)
- [Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05751/) (2018)
- [Deep Multi-scale Convolutional Neural Network for Dynamic Scene Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02177/) (2016)
- [CCNet: Criss-Cross Attention for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11721/) (2018)
- [Twins: Revisiting the Design of Spatial Attention in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13840/) (2021)
- [Conditional Positional Encodings for Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10882/) (2021)
- [DeblurGAN-v2: Deblurring (Orders-of-Magnitude) Faster and Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03826/) (2019)
- [Learning Texture Transformer Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04139/) (2020)
- [Scale-recurrent Network for Deep Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01770/) (2018)
- [Rethinking Coarse-to-Fine Approach in Single Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05054/) (2021)
- [Contrastive Learning for Compact Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09367/) (2021)
- [Deep Stacked Hierarchical Multi-patch Network for Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03468/) (2019)
- [Deblurring by Realistic Blurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01860/) (2020)
- [Human-Aware Motion Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06816/) (2020)
- [Learning Joint Spatial-Temporal Transformations for Video Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10247/) (2020)
- [Learning a Convolutional Neural Network for Non-uniform Motion Blur Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.00593/) (2015)
- [Spatially-Attentive Patch-Hierarchical Network for Adaptive Motion Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05343/) (2020)
- [Strip Pooling: Rethinking Spatial Pooling for Scene Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13328/) (2020)
- [Multi-Temporal Recurrent Neural Networks For Progressive Non-Uniform Single Image Deblurring With Incremental Temporal Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07410/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 140)

- [Efficient Frequency Domain-based Transformers for High-Quality Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12250/) (2022)
- [Efficient and Explicit Modelling of Image Hierarchies for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00748/) (2023)
- [AdaIR: Adaptive All-in-One Image Restoration via Frequency Mining and Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14614/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Models for Image Restoration and Enhancement: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09388/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Integration Diffusion Model for Realistic Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12966/) (2023)
- [Multiscale Structure Guided Diffusion for Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01789/) (2022)
- [Perceive-IR: Learning to Perceive Degradation Better for All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15994/) (2024)
- [DMPlug: A Plug-in Method for Solving Inverse Problems with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16749/) (2024)
- [Recursive Generalization Transformer for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06373/) (2023)
- [Efficient Visual State Space Model for Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14343/) (2024)
- [FMA-Net: Flow-Guided Dynamic Filtering and Iterative Feature Refinement with Multi-Attention for Joint Video Super-Resolution and Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03707/) (2024)
- [Frequency Decoupling for Motion Magnification via Multi-Level Isomorphic Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07347/) (2024)
- [Visual-Instructed Degradation Diffusion for All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16960/) (2025)
- [Learning Enriched Features via Selective State Spaces Model for Efficient Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20106/) (2024)
- [AdaRevD: Adaptive Patch Exiting Reversible Decoder Pushes the Limit of Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09135/) (2024)
- [Efficient Multi-scale Network with Learnable Discrete Wavelet Transform for Blind Motion Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00027/) (2023)
- [CU-Mamba: Selective State Space Models with Channel Learning for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11778/) (2024)
- [ParamISP: Learned Forward and Inverse ISPs using Camera Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13313/) (2023)
- [From Zero to Detail: Deconstructing Ultra-High-Definition Image Restoration from Progressive Spectral Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13165/) (2025)
- [Towards Real-world Event-guided Low-light Video Enhancement and Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14916/) (2024)
- [HSIGene: A Foundation Model For Hyperspectral Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12470/) (2024)
- [ID-Blau: Image Deblurring by Implicit Diffusion-based reBLurring AUgmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10998/) (2023)
- [Motion-adaptive Separable Collaborative Filters for Blind Motion Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13153/) (2024)
- [LoFormer: Local Frequency Transformer for Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16993/) (2024)
- [Dropout the High-rate Downsampling: A Novel Design Paradigm for UHD Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.06456/) (2024)
- [BARD-GS: Blur-Aware Reconstruction of Dynamic Scenes via Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15835/) (2025)
- [LoRA-IR: Taming Low-Rank Experts for Efficient All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15385/) (2024)
- [StableVQA: A Deep No-Reference Quality Assessment Model for Video Stability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04904/) (2023)
- [Phaseformer: Phase-based Attention Mechanism for Underwater Image Restoration and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01456/) (2024)
- [Mixed Hierarchy Network for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09554/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Images taken in dynamic scenes may contain unwanted motion blur, which significantly degrades visual quality. Such blur causes short- and long-range region-specific smoothing artifacts that are often directional and non-uniform, which is difficult to be removed. Inspired by the current success of transformers on computer vision and image processing tasks, we develop, Stripformer, a transformer-based architecture that constructs intra- and inter-strip tokens to reweight image features in the horizontal and vertical directions to catch blurred patterns with different orientations. It stacks interlaced intra-strip and inter-strip attention layers to reveal blur magnitudes. In addition to detecting region-specific blurred patterns of various orientations and magnitudes, Stripformer is also a token-efficient and parameter-efficient transformer model, demanding much less memory usage and computation cost than the vanilla transformer but works better without relying on tremendous training data. Experimental results show that Stripformer performs favorably against state-of-the-art models in dynamic scene deblurring.