# MOFA: A Model Simplification Roadmap for Image Restoration on Mobile Devices

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.12494 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12494/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [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)
- [ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11164/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Deep Multi-scale Convolutional Neural Network for Dynamic Scene Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02177/) (2016)
- [Simple Baselines for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04676/) (2022)
- [InternImage: Exploring Large-Scale Vision Foundation Models with Deformable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05778/) (2022)
- [Deep Joint Rain Detection and Removal from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07769/) (2016)
- [Density-aware Single Image De-raining using a Multi-stream Dense Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07412/) (2018)
- [HINet: Half Instance Normalization Network for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06086/) (2021)
- [Visual Attention Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09741/) (2022)
- [Image De-raining Using a Conditional Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.05957/) (2017)
- [Learning Enriched Features for Fast Image Restoration and Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01649/) (2022)
- [Run, Don't Walk: Chasing Higher FLOPS for Faster Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03667/) (2023)
- [MobileOne: An Improved One millisecond Mobile Backbone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04040/) (2022)
- [Practical Deep Raw Image Denoising on Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06935/) (2020)
- [Burst Image Restoration and Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03680/) (2021)
- [Improving Image Restoration by Revisiting Global Information Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04491/) (2021)
- [NTIRE 2021 Challenge on Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14854/) (2021)
- [Predicting the Computational Cost of Deep Learning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11880/) (2018)
- [VanillaNet: the Power of Minimalism in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12972/) (2023)
- [Face Deblurring using Dual Camera Fusion on Mobile Phones](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11617/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [MobileIE: An Extremely Lightweight and Effective ConvNet for Real-Time Image Enhancement on Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01838/) (2025)
- [NTIRE 2025 Challenge on RAW Image Restoration and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02197/) (2025)
- [Distilling 3D Spatial Reasoning into a Lightweight Vision-Language Model with CoT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09719/) (2026)
- [LiteKD-Net: Lightweight Knowledge-Distilled Network for Mobile Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05739/) (2026)
- [Benchmarking RAW and RGB Restoration in Image Signal Processors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02831/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Image restoration aims to restore high-quality images from degraded counterparts and has seen significant advancements through deep learning techniques. The technique has been widely applied to mobile devices for tasks such as mobile photography. Given the resource limitations on mobile devices, such as memory constraints and runtime requirements, the efficiency of models during deployment becomes paramount. Nevertheless, most previous works have primarily concentrated on analyzing the efficiency of single modules and improving them individually. This paper examines the efficiency across different layers. We propose a roadmap that can be applied to further accelerate image restoration models prior to deployment while simultaneously increasing PSNR (Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio) and SSIM (Structural Similarity Index). The roadmap first increases the model capacity by adding more parameters to partial convolutions on FLOPs non-sensitive layers. Then, it applies partial depthwise convolution coupled with decoupling upsampling/downsampling layers to accelerate the model speed. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach decreases runtime by up to 13% and reduces the number of parameters by up to 23%, while increasing PSNR and SSIM on several image restoration datasets. Source Code of our method is available at hrefhttps://github.com/xiangyu8/MOFAhttps://github.com/xiangyu8/MOFA.