# Efficient Image Deblurring Networks based on Diffusion Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05907 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05907/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Inverse problems and image restoration, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 71 of its 88 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Jan 2024.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Inverse problems and image restoration](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/inverse-problems-and-image-restoration/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 71)

- [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)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Transformers are RNNs: Fast Autoregressive Transformers with Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16236/) (2020)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [Big Bird: Transformers for Longer Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14062/) (2020)
- [Reformer: The Efficient Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04451/) (2020)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Attention with Performers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14794/) (2020)
- [Generating Long Sequences with Sparse Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10509/) (2019)
- [Linformer: Self-Attention with Linear Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04768/) (2020)
- [Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07291/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [CascadedGaze: Efficiency in Global Context Extraction for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15235/) (2024)
- [BlurDM: A Blur Diffusion Model for Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03979/) (2025)
- [EventDiff: A Unified and Efficient Diffusion Model Framework for Event-based Video Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08235/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This article presents a sliding window model for defocus deblurring, named Swintormer, which achieves the best performance to date with remarkably low memory usage. This method utilizes a diffusion model to generate latent prior features, aiding in the restoration of more detailed images. Additionally, by adapting the sliding window strategy, it incorporates specialized Transformer blocks to enhance inference efficiency. The adoption of this new approach has led to a substantial reduction in Multiply-Accumulate Operations (MACs) per iteration, drastically cutting down memory requirements. In comparison to the currently leading GRL method, our Swintormer model significantly reduces the computational load that must depend on memory capacity, from 140.35 GMACs to 8.02 GMACs, while improving the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) for defocus deblurring from 27.04 dB to 27.07 dB. This innovative technique enables the processing of higher resolution images on memory-limited devices, vastly broadening potential application scenarios. The article wraps up with an ablation study, offering a comprehensive examination of how each network module contributes to the final performance.The source code and model will be available at the following website: https://github.com/bnm6900030/swintormer.