# DnSwin: Toward Real-World Denoising via Continuous Wavelet Sliding-Transformer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.13861 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13861/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [TransUNet: Transformers Make Strong Encoders for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04306/) (2021)
- [Beyond a Gaussian Denoiser: Residual Learning of Deep CNN for Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03981/) (2016)
- [CvT: Introducing Convolutions to Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15808/) (2021)
- [Pre-Trained Image Processing Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00364/) (2020)
- [Uformer: A General U-Shaped Transformer for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03106/) (2021)
- [Multi-Stage Progressive Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02808/) (2021)
- [Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05751/) (2018)
- [ConViT: Improving Vision Transformers with Soft Convolutional Inductive Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10697/) (2021)
- [Learning Texture Transformer Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04139/) (2020)
- [Toward Convolutional Blind Denoising of Real Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04686/) (2018)
- [Unprocessing Images for Learned Raw Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11127/) (2018)
- [Incorporating Convolution Designs into Visual Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11816/) (2021)
- [Residual Non-local Attention Networks for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10082/) (2019)
- [LocalViT: Analyzing Locality in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05707/) (2021)
- [Scaling Local Self-Attention for Parameter Efficient Visual Backbones](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12731/) (2021)
- [CycleISP: Real Image Restoration via Improved Data Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07761/) (2020)
- [Benchmarking Denoising Algorithms with Real Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01313/) (2017)
- [Trainable Nonlinear Reaction Diffusion: A Flexible Framework for Fast and Effective Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.02848/) (2015)
- [Real Image Denoising with Feature Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07396/) (2019)
- [Neighbor2Neighbor: Self-Supervised Denoising from Single Noisy Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02824/) (2021)
- [Learning Enriched Features for Fast Image Restoration and Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01649/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Real-World Denoising via Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04457/) (2023)
- [DenoGrad: A Gradient-Based Framework for Data Refinement in Tabular and Time-Series Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10161/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Real-world image denoising is a practical image restoration problem that aims to obtain clean images from in-the-wild noisy inputs. Recently, the Vision Transformer (ViT) has exhibited a strong ability to capture long-range dependencies, and many researchers have attempted to apply the ViT to image denoising tasks. However, a real-world image is an isolated frame that makes the ViT build long-range dependencies based on the internal patches, which divides images into patches, disarranges noise patterns and damages gradient continuity. In this article, we propose to resolve this issue by using a continuous Wavelet Sliding-Transformer that builds frequency correspondences under real-world scenes, called DnSwin. Specifically, we first extract the bottom features from noisy input images by using a convolutional neural network (CNN) encoder. The key to DnSwin is to extract high-frequency and low-frequency information from the observed features and build frequency dependencies. To this end, we propose a Wavelet Sliding-Window Transformer (WSWT) that utilizes the discrete wavelet transform (DWT), self-attention and the inverse DWT (IDWT) to extract deep features. Finally, we reconstruct the deep features into denoised images using a CNN decoder. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluations conducted on real-world denoising benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed DnSwin performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods.