High-resolution image reflection removal by Laplacian-based component-aware transformer

Recent data-driven deep learning methods for image reflection removal have made impressive progress, promoting the quality of photo capturing and scene understanding. Due to the massive consumption of computational complexity and memory usage, the performance of these methods degrades significantly while dealing with high-resolution images. Besides, most existing methods for reflection removal can only remove reflection patterns by downsampling the input image into a much lower resolution, resulting in the loss of plentiful information. In this paper, we propose a novel transformer-based framework for high-resolution image reflection removal, termed as the Laplacian pyramid-based component-aware transformer (LapCAT). LapCAT leverages a Laplacian pyramid network to remove high-frequency reflection patterns and reconstruct the high-resolution background image guided by the clean low-frequency background components. Guided by the reflection mask through pixel-wise contrastive learning, LapCAT designs a component-separable transformer block (CSTB) which removes reflection patterns from the background constituents through a reflection-aware multi-head self-attention mechanism. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets for reflection removal demonstrate the superiority of our LapCAT, especially the excellent performance and high efficiency in removing reflection from high-resolution images than state-of-the-art methods.