KT-Deblur: Kolmogorov–Arnold and Transformer Networks for Remote Sensing Image Deblurring

Aiming to address the fundamental limitation of fixed activation functions that constrain network expressiveness in existing deep deblurring models, in this pioneering study, we introduced Kolmogorov–Arnold Networks (KANs) into the field of full-color/RGB image deblurring, proposing the Kolmogorov–Arnold and Transformer Network (KT-Deblur) framework based on dynamically learnable activation functions. This framework overcomes the constraints of traditional networks’ fixed nonlinear transformations by employing adaptive activation regulation for different blur types through KANs’ differentiable basis functions. Integrated with a U-Net architecture within a generative adversarial network framework, it significantly enhances detail restoration capabilities in complex scenarios. The innovatively designed Unified Attention Feature Extraction (UAFE) module combines neighborhood self-attention with linear self-attention mechanisms, achieving synergistic optimization of noise suppression and detail enhancement through adaptive feature space weighting. Supported by the Fast Spatial Feature Module (FSFM), it effectively improves the model’s ability to handle complex blur patterns. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing algorithms in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity (SSIM) metrics across multiple standard datasets, achieving an average PSNR of 41.25 dB on the RealBlur-R dataset, surpassing the latest state-of-the-art (SOTA) algorithms. This model exhibits strong robustness, providing a new paradigm for image-deblurring network design.