# SwinFIR: Revisiting the SwinIR with Fast Fourier Convolution and Improved Training for Image Super-Resolution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.11247 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11247/

## Key facts

- Cited by 68 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [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)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02921/) (2017)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Very Deep Residual Channel Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02758/) (2018)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.00092/) (2014)
- [Accurate Image Super-Resolution Using Very Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04587/) (2015)
- [Pre-Trained Image Processing Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00364/) (2020)
- [Residual Dense Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08797/) (2018)
- [Resolution-robust Large Mask Inpainting with Fourier Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07161/) (2021)
- [Deep Laplacian Pyramid Networks for Fast and Accurate Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03915/) (2017)
- [Activating More Pixels in Image Super-Resolution Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04437/) (2022)
- [Accelerating the Super-Resolution Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00367/) (2016)
- [Deeply-Recursive Convolutional Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04491/) (2015)
- [Single Image Super-Resolution via a Holistic Attention Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08767/) (2020)
- [Residual Non-local Attention Networks for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10082/) (2019)
- [Lightweight Image Super-Resolution with Information Multi-distillation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11856/) (2019)
- [EnhanceNet: Single Image Super-Resolution Through Automated Texture Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.07919/) (2016)
- [Feedback Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.09814/) (2019)
- [Fast and Accurate Image Super-Resolution with Deep Laplacian Pyramid Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.01992/) (2017)
- [Interpreting Super-Resolution Networks with Local Attribution Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11036/) (2020)
- [Cross-Scale Internal Graph Neural Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16673/) (2020)
- [NAFSSR: Stereo Image Super-Resolution Using NAFNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08714/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 68)

- [Diffusion Models for Image Restoration and Enhancement: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09388/) (2023)
- [ResDiff: Combining CNN and Diffusion Model for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08714/) (2023)
- [DRCT: Saving Image Super-resolution away from Information Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00722/) (2024)
- [NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Image Super-Resolution (x4): Methods and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09790/) (2024)
- [CAMixerSR: Only Details Need More "Attention"](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19289/) (2024)
- [The Tenth NTIRE 2025 Efficient Super-Resolution Challenge Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10686/) (2025)
- [Hitchhiker's Guide to Super-Resolution: Introduction and Recent Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13131/) (2022)
- [FreeSeed: Frequency-band-aware and Self-guided Network for Sparse-view CT Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05890/) (2023)
- [GIM: A Million-scale Benchmark for Generative Image Manipulation Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16531/) (2024)
- [SRFormerV2: Taking a Closer Look at Permuted Self-Attention for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09735/) (2023)
- [MTKD: Multi-Teacher Knowledge Distillation for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09571/) (2024)
- [HIIF: Hierarchical Encoding based Implicit Image Function for Continuous Super-resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03748/) (2024)
- [NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Short-form UGC Video Quality Assessment and Enhancement: Methods and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13131/) (2025)
- [CausalSR: Structural Causal Model-Driven Super-Resolution with Counterfactual Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15852/) (2025)
- [NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Image Super-Resolution (x4): Methods and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14582/) (2025)
- [SwinFSR: Stereo Image Super-Resolution using SwinIR and Frequency Domain Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12556/) (2023)
- [WaveMixSR: A Resource-efficient Neural Network for Image Super-resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00430/) (2023)
- [Training Transformer Models by Wavelet Losses Improves Quantitative and Visual Performance in Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11273/) (2024)
- [Resolution Enhancement Processing on Low Quality Images Using Swin Transformer Based on Interval Dense Connection Strategy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09190/) (2023)
- [NTIRE 2025 Challenge on RAW Image Restoration and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02197/) (2025)
- [Swin2-MoSE: A New Single Image Super-Resolution Model for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18924/) (2024)
- [Image Deraining with Frequency-Enhanced State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16470/) (2024)
- [Spatial-Frequency Attention for Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13598/) (2023)
- [MIPI 2023 Challenge on Nighttime Flare Removal: Methods and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13770/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Image Super-Resolution from Training Data Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00768/) (2024)
- [6Img-to-3D: Few-Image Large-Scale Outdoor Driving Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12378/) (2024)
- [Cross-View Hierarchy Network for Stereo Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06236/) (2023)
- [Generative AI in Vision: A Survey on Models, Metrics and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16369/) (2024)
- [Auto-Encoded Supervision for Perceptual Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00124/) (2024)
- [Depth-Aware Super-Resolution via Distance-Adaptive Variational Formulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05746/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Transformer-based methods have achieved impressive image restoration performance due to their capacities to model long-range dependency compared to CNN-based methods. However, advances like SwinIR adopts the window-based and local attention strategy to balance the performance and computational overhead, which restricts employing large receptive fields to capture global information and establish long dependencies in the early layers. To further improve the efficiency of capturing global information, in this work, we propose SwinFIR to extend SwinIR by replacing Fast Fourier Convolution (FFC) components, which have the image-wide receptive field. We also revisit other advanced techniques, i.e, data augmentation, pre-training, and feature ensemble to improve the effect of image reconstruction. And our feature ensemble method enables the performance of the model to be considerably enhanced without increasing the training and testing time. We applied our algorithm on multiple popular large-scale benchmarks and achieved state-of-the-art performance comparing to the existing methods. For example, our SwinFIR achieves the PSNR of 32.83 dB on Manga109 dataset, which is 0.8 dB higher than the state-of-the-art SwinIR method.