Transformer architectures for computer vision: A comprehensive review and future research directions

¹ PhD Research Scholar, Department of Computer Engineering, VIIT, Affiliation to Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU) Pune - 411048, India
² Research Supervisor, Department of Computer Engineering, VIIT, Affiliation to Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU) Pune - 411048, India

^* Corresponding author: ugiletukaram@gmail.com

Published online: 20 November 2025

Abstract

Long-range dependencies and contextual relationships in videos were captured by using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in past. Recently the use of Transformers is started for capturing the long-range dependencies and contextual relationships in videos. Transformers have made revolutionary impacts in Natural Language Processing (NLP) area and started making significant contributions in Computer Vision problems. So, it was required to perform the review of different Transformer Architectures in Computer Vision which will help to use them for different applications in Computer Vision. 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.