Papers › Simple Baselines for Image Restoration

Simple Baselines for Image Restoration

10 Apr 2022arXiv:2204.04676archive 2025-07-28

Liangyu Chen, Xiaojie Chu, Xiangyu Zhang, Jian Sun

Although there have been significant advances in the field of image restoration recently, the system complexity of the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods is increasing as well, which may hinder the convenient analysis and comparison of methods. In this paper, we propose a simple baseline that exceeds the SOTA methods and is computationally efficient. To further simplify the baseline, we reveal that the nonlinear activation functions, e.g. Sigmoid, ReLU, GELU, Softmax, etc. are not necessary: they could be replaced by multiplication or removed. Thus, we derive a Nonlinear Activation Free Network, namely NAFNet, from the baseline. SOTA results are achieved on various challenging benchmarks, e.g. 33.69 dB PSNR on GoPro (for image deblurring), exceeding the previous SOTA 0.38 dB with only 8.4% of its computational costs; 40.30 dB PSNR on SIDD (for image denoising), exceeding the previous SOTA 0.28 dB with less than half of its computational costs. The code and the pre-trained models are released at https://github.com/megvii-research/NAFNet.

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Syntology Ran 23 of 30 code samples harvested from 9 repositories linked to this paper; 7 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 4 ran · our draft was wrong; 1 ran · fixture could not drive it; 18 ran with no contract checked.

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13 repositories listed; official and paper-mentioned ones first.

megvii-research/NAFNet officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report
dhryougit/afm mentioned on GitHubpytorchNOASSERTION report
dhryougit/learning-to-translate-noise mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
dslisleedh/NAFNet-flax mentioned on GitHubjax report
dslisleedh/NAFNet-tensorflow2 mentioned on GitHubtf report
megvii-research/TLC mentioned on GitHubpytorchNOASSERTION report
megvii-research/tlsc mentioned on GitHubpytorchNOASSERTION report
setsunil/dsdnet mentioned on GitHubpytorchNOASSERTION report
murufeng/FUIR pytorchApache-2.0 report

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4ran · our draft was wrong
1ran · fixture could not drive it
18ran
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NAFNet megvii-research/NAFNet/basicsr/models/archs/NAFNet_arch.py official repository ran fingerprinted licence not identified · pointer only · b1bd781b7fd93162 · report
Baseline dhryougit/afm/basicsr/models/archs/Baseline_arch.py community (archive-listed) ran fingerprinted licence not identified · pointer only · 6ce5b700c75ef796 · report
BaselineBlock dhryougit/afm/basicsr/models/archs/Baseline_arch.py community (archive-listed) ran fingerprinted licence not identified · pointer only · 1a0ca651efcee9e4 · report
DYNUnet rflepp/efficient_mobile_denoising_models/models/Dynamic_PlainNet.py community (archive-listed) ran licence not identified · pointer only · 6b743630418d829e · report
NAFBlock lime-j/nafnet-jax/nafnet/models.py community (archive-listed) ran · metamorphic tier: deterministic no licence file found · pointer only · ea0be350b35c3e6e · report
NAFBlock dhryougit/learning-to-translate-noise/models/modules/NAFNet_arch.py community (archive-listed) ran · metamorphic tier: deterministic fingerprinted no licence file found · pointer only · aa1fe0a698ddd646 · report
NAFNet lime-j/nafnet-jax/nafnet/models.py community (archive-listed) ran · metamorphic tier: deterministic no licence file found · pointer only · c1fd5bcc1ef3945c · report
NAFNet dhryougit/learning-to-translate-noise/models/modules/NAFNet_arch.py community (archive-listed) ran · metamorphic tier: deterministic no licence file found · pointer only · 2dd382ce15e8576d · report
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PixelShuffle rflepp/efficient_mobile_denoising_models/models/Dynamic_PlainNet.py community (archive-listed) ran licence not identified · pointer only · a6c8a89b84e34837 · report
SimpleAttention lime-j/nafnet-jax/nafnet/models.py community (archive-listed) ran · metamorphic tier: deterministic no licence file found · pointer only · 9817ec8782366e50 · report
calculate_fid murufeng/FUIR/basicsr/metrics/fid.py community (archive-listed) ran Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 1d7ce6d6dd7ff5c1 · report
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get_position_from_periods murufeng/FUIR/basicsr/models/lr_scheduler.py community (archive-listed) ran fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · cd569444547de84f · report
prepare_for_ssim murufeng/FUIR/basicsr/metrics/psnr_ssim.py community (archive-listed) ran fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 95c6eba9350a455a · report
reorder_image murufeng/FUIR/basicsr/metrics/metric_util.py community (archive-listed) ran Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 95067518dc16b3e5 · report
upconv_concat rflepp/efficient_mobile_denoising_models/models/Dynamic_PlainNet.py community (archive-listed) ran · fixture could not drive it fingerprinted licence not identified · pointer only · f73610cd536dfe73 · report
GlobalAvgPool2D lime-j/nafnet-jax/nafnet/models.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · 877c91a4cf4c1ce4 · report
NAFNet dslisleedh/NAFNet-tensorflow2/model.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · 71e9dde3df3073c4 · report
NAFNet dslisleedh/NAFNet-flax/nafnet.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · 11a0e1dab1191c4e · report
NAFnet Thehunk1206/Image-Restorers/models/archs/naf_net.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 913b39408baa4210 · report
SimpleGate lime-j/nafnet-jax/nafnet/models.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · 95df3ed7752edb6b · report
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niqe murufeng/FUIR/basicsr/metrics/niqe.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 0029cb1566e47350 · report

Tasks

DeblurringDenoisingImage DeblurringImage DenoisingImage RestorationSingle Image Desnowing

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Deblurring GoPro NAFNet PSNR 33.69 #14 of 56 Archive leaderboard report
Deblurring GoPro NAFNet SSIM 0.967 #14 of 56 Archive leaderboard report
Deblurring MSU BASED NAFNet (REDS) ERQAv2.0 0.74508 #1 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Deblurring MSU BASED NAFNet (REDS) LPIPS 0.08561 #1 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Deblurring MSU BASED NAFNet (REDS) PSNR 30.54803 #1 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Deblurring MSU BASED NAFNet (REDS) SSIM 0.95035 #1 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Deblurring MSU BASED NAFNet (REDS) Subjective 2.8405 #1 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Deblurring MSU BASED NAFNet (REDS) VMAF 66.85941 #1 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Deblurring GoPro NAFNet - TLC PSNR 33.69 #18 of 55 Archive leaderboard report
Image Deblurring GoPro NAFNet - TLC Params (M) 67.89 #18 of 55 Archive leaderboard report
Image Deblurring GoPro NAFNet - TLC SSIM 0.967 #18 of 55 Archive leaderboard report
Image Denoising SIDD NAFNet PSNR (sRGB) 40.30 #3 of 22 Archive leaderboard report
Image Denoising SIDD NAFNet SSIM (sRGB) 0.961 #3 of 22 Archive leaderboard report
Image Restoration CDD-11 NAFNet Average PSNR (dB) 24.13 #11 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Image Restoration CDD-11 NAFNet SSIM 0.7964 #11 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Single Image Desnowing CSD NAFNet Average PSNR (dB) 35.13 #4 of 6 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

NAFNetSoftmax

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