# Progressive Frequency-Aware Network for Laparoscopic Image Desmoking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.12023 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12023/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Uformer: A General U-Shaped Transformer for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03106/) (2021)
- [EndoNet: A Deep Architecture for Recognition Tasks on Laparoscopic Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.03012/) (2016)
- [DehazeNet: An End-to-End System for Single Image Haze Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.07661/) (2016)
- [LocalViT: Analyzing Locality in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05707/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Single Image Fog Removal using Enhanced Cycle Consistent Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01374/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [LSD3K: A Benchmark for Smoke Removal from Laparoscopic Surgery Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13132/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Surgical Smoke: A Smoke-Type-Aware Laparoscopic Video Desmoking Method and Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02780/) (2025)
- [RGA-Net: A Vision Enhancement Framework for Robotic Surgical Systems Using Reciprocal Attention Mechanisms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13726/) (2026)
- [PhySe-RPO: Physics and Semantics Guided Relative Policy Optimization for Diffusion-Based Surgical Smoke Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22844/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Laparoscopic surgery offers minimally invasive procedures with better patient outcomes, but smoke presence challenges visibility and safety. Existing learning-based methods demand large datasets and high computational resources. We propose the Progressive Frequency-Aware Network (PFAN), a lightweight GAN framework for laparoscopic image desmoking, combining the strengths of CNN and Transformer for progressive information extraction in the frequency domain. PFAN features CNN-based Multi-scale Bottleneck-Inverting (MBI) Blocks for capturing local high-frequency information and Locally-Enhanced Axial Attention Transformers (LAT) for efficiently handling global low-frequency information. PFAN efficiently desmokes laparoscopic images even with limited training data. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in PSNR, SSIM, CIEDE2000, and visual quality on the Cholec80 dataset and retains only 629K parameters. Our code and models are made publicly available at: https://github.com/jlzcode/PFAN.