TRANSFORMER ARCHITECTURES FOR COMPUTER VISION: A COMPREHENSIVE REVIEW AND FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS

Transformers have made revolutionary impacts in Natural Language Processing (NLP) area and started making significant contributions in Computer Vision problems. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the Transformer Architectures in Computer Vision, providing a detailed view about their evolution from Vision Transformers (ViTs) to more advanced variants of transformers like Swin Transformer, Transformer-XL, and Hybrid CNN-Transformer models. We have tried to make the study of the advantages of the Transformers over the traditional Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), their applications for Object Detection, Image Classification, Video Analysis, and their computational challenges. Finally, we discuss the future research directions, including the self-attention mechanisms, multi-modal learning, and lightweight architectures for Edge Computing.