Dual Prior Unfolding for Snapshot Compressive Imaging

Recently, deep unfolding methods have achieved remarkable success in the realm of Snapshot Compressive Imaging (SCI) reconstruction. However, the existing methods all follow the iterative framework of a single image prior, which limits the efficiency of the unfolding methods and makes it a problem to use other priors simply and effectively. To break out of the box, we derive an effective Dual Prior Unfolding (DPU), which achieves the joint utilization of multiple deep priors and greatly improves iteration efficiency. Our unfolding method is implemented through two parts, i.e., Dual Prior Framework (DPF) and Focused Attention (FA). In brief, in addition to the normal image prior, DPF introduces a residual into the iteration formula and constructs a degraded prior for the residual by considering various degradations to establish the unfolding framework. To improve the effectiveness of the image prior based on self-attention, FA adopts a novel mechanism inspired by PCA denoising to scale and filter attention, which lets the attention focus more on effective features with little computation cost. Besides, an asymmetric backbone is proposed to further improve the efficiency of hierarchical self-attention. Remarkably, our 5-stage DPU achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance with the least FLOPs and parameters compared to previous methods, while our 9-stage DPU significantly outperforms other unfolding methods with less computational requirement.