WCT-Net: joint restoration of tomb murals based on wavelet convolution and transformer self-attention collaborative network

The digital restoration of tomb murals is critical for cultural heritage preservation. Existing research focuses on repairing internal lacunae and lacks an effective coordinated restoration solution for cross-scale compound deterioration involving coexisting peripheral information loss and internal degradation. To address this, we propose a restoration of tomb Murals based on Wavelet Convolution and Transformer Self-Attention Collaborative Network. The wavelet branch enhances local structure preservation by explicitly decoupling and reconstructing frequency-domain features, while the Transformer branch establishes long‑range semantic dependencies to ensure globally consistent structural extrapolation. An enhanced feature fusion unit collaboratively suppresses structural distortion and detail blur, achieving pixel-level high-fidelity restoration. Additionally, the multi-scale cross-layer feature aggregation module further strengthens the decoder’s reconstruction capability. Experiments on Tang Dynasty tomb mural fragments with missing peripheral information show our method improves structural fidelity (PSNR) by 3.5%, perceptual quality (LPIPS) by 15.1%, visual authenticity (FID) by 30.5%, demonstrating its effectiveness in restoring complex damage.