HINet: Half Instance Normalization Network for Image Restoration

In this paper, we explore the role of Instance Normalization in low-level vision tasks. Specifically, we present a novel block: Half Instance Normalization Block (HIN Block), to boost the performance of image restoration networks. Based on HIN Block, we design a simple and powerful multi-stage network named HINet, which consists of two subnetworks. With the help of HIN Block, HINet surpasses the state-of-the-art (SOTA) on various image restoration tasks. For image denoising, we exceed it 0.11dB and 0.28 dB in PSNR on SIDD dataset, with only 7.5% and 30% of its multiplier-accumulator operations (MACs), 6.8 x and 2.9x speedup respectively. For image deblurring, we get comparable performance with 22.5% of its MACs and 3.3 x speedup on REDS and GoPro datasets. For image deraining, we exceed it by 0.3 dB in PSNR on the average result of multiple datasets with 1.4x speedup. With HINet, we won the 1st place on the NTIRE 2021 Image Deblurring Challenge - Track2. JPEG Artifacts, with a PSNR of 29.70.