Images with haze of different varieties often pose a significant challenge to dehazing. Therefore, guidance by estimates of haze parameters related to the variety would be beneficial, and their progressive update jointly with haze reduction will allow effective dehazing. To this end, we propose a multi-network dehazing framework containing novel interdependent dehazing and haze parameter updater networks that operate in a progressive manner. The haze parameters, transmission map and atmospheric light, are first estimated using dedicated convolutional networks that allow color-cast handling. The estimated parameters are then used to guide our dehazing module, where the estimates are progressively updated by novel convolutional networks. The updating takes place jointly with progressive dehazing using a network that invokes inter-step dependencies. The joint progressive updating and dehazing gradually modify the haze parameter values toward achieving effective dehazing. Through different studies, our dehazing framework is shown to be more effective than image-to-image mapping and predefined haze formation model based dehazing. The framework is also found capable of handling a wide variety of hazy conditions wtih different types and amounts of haze and color casts. Our dehazing framework is qualitatively and quantitatively found to outperform the state-of-the-art on synthetic and real-world hazy images of multiple datasets with varied haze conditions.
Jiangxi Normal University（江西师范大学）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）
Single image dehazing is a challenging ill-posed restoration problem. Various prior-based and learning-based methods have been proposed. Most of them follow a classic atmospheric scattering model which is an elegant simplified physical model based on the assumption of single-scattering and homogeneous atmospheric medium. The formulation of haze in realistic environment is more complicated. In this paper, we propose to take its essential mechanism as "black box", and focus on learning an input-adaptive trainable end-to-end dehazing model. An U-Net like encoder-decoder deep network via progressi…
Shanxi University（山西大学）；The Institute of Computer Science and Technology, Peking University（北京大学计算机科学技术研究所）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学人工智能与机器人研究所）；State Key Laboratory of Information Security, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所信息安全国家重点实验室）
The formulation of the hazy image is mainly dominated by the reflected lights and ambient airlight. Existing dehazing methods often ignore the depth cues and fail in distant areas where heavier haze disturbs the visibility. However, we note that the guidance of the depth information for transmission estimation could remedy the decreased visibility as distances increase. In turn, the good transmission estimation could facilitate the depth estimation for hazy images. In this paper, a deep end-to-end model that iteratively estimates image depths and transmission maps is proposed to perform an eff…
School of Computer and Information Technology, Shanxi University（山西大学计算机与信息技术学院）；Institute of Computer Science and Technology, Peking University（北京大学计算机科学技术研究所）；Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）
The recent physical model-free dehazing methods have achieved state-of-the-art performances. However, without the guidance of physical models, the performances degrade rapidly when applied to real scenarios due to the unavailable or insufficient data problems. On the other hand, the physical model-based methods have better interpretability but suffer from multi-objective optimizations of parameters, which may lead to sub-optimal dehazing results. In this paper, a progressive residual learning strategy has been proposed to combine the physical model-free dehazing process with reformulated scatt…
East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Jiangxi Normal University（江西师范大学）
Single image dehazing is a challenging ill-posed problem that has drawn significant attention in the last few years. Recently, convolutional neural networks have achieved great success in image dehazing. However, it is still difficult for these increasingly complex models to recover accurate details from the hazy image. In this paper, we pay attention to the feature extraction and utilization of the input image itself. To achieve this, we propose a Multi-scale Topological Network (MSTN) to fully explore the features at different scales. Meanwhile, we design a Multi-scale Feature Fusion Module …
Tianjin University（天津大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（起源人工智能研究院）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）
Single image dehazing is a challenging task, for which the domain shift between synthetic training data and real-world testing images usually leads to degradation of existing methods. To address this issue, we propose a novel image dehazing framework collaborating with unlabeled real data. First, we develop a disentangled image dehazing network (DID-Net), which disentangles the feature representations into three component maps, i.e. the latent haze-free image, the transmission map, and the global atmospheric light estimate, respecting the physical model of a haze process. Our DID-Net predicts …
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）
To solve the issue of video dehazing, there are two main tasks to attain: how to align adjacent frames to the reference frame; how to restore the reference frame. Some papers adopt explicit approaches (e.g., the Markov random field, optical flow, deformable convolution, 3D convolution) to align neighboring frames with the reference frame in feature space or image space, they then use various restoration methods to achieve the final dehazing results. In this paper, we propose a progressive alignment and restoration method for video dehazing. The alignment process aligns consecutive neighboring …
Mutual Information-driven Triple Interaction Network for Efficient Image Dehazing
Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学）；Intelligent Interconnected Systems Laboratory of Anhui Province（安徽省智能互联系统实验室）；Guangxi Academy of Sciences（广西科学院）；ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）
Harbin Institute of Technology at Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Tencent（腾讯）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong at Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））
Restoring the clean background from the superimposed images containing a noisy layer is the common crux of a classical category of tasks on image restoration such as image reflection removal, image deraining and image dehazing. These tasks are typically formulated and tackled individually due to the diverse and complicated appearance patterns of noise layers within the image. In this work we present the Deep-Masking Generative Network (DMGN), which is a unified framework for background restoration from the superimposed images and is able to cope with different types of noise. Our proposed DMGN…
College of Artificial Intelligence, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学人工智能学院）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Hikvision Research America（海康威视美国研究院）；University of California, Merced（加州大学默塞德分校）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
In this paper, we propose a Multi-Scale Boosted Dehazing Network with Dense Feature Fusion based on the U-Net architecture. The proposed method is designed based on two principles, boosting and error feedback, and we show that they are suitable for the dehazing problem. By incorporating the Strengthen-Operate-Subtract boosting strategy in the decoder of the proposed model, we develop a simple yet effective boosted decoder to progressively restore the haze-free image. To address the issue of preserving spatial information in the U-Net architecture, we design a dense feature fusion module using …
AdaIR: Adaptive All-in-One Image Restoration via Frequency Mining and Modulation
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（Inception人工智能研究院）；Mohammed Bin Zayed University of AI（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）；Linköping University（林雪平大学）
In current practice, many image processing tasks are done sequentially (e.g. denoising, dehazing, followed by semantic segmentation). In this paper, we propose a novel multi-task neural network architecture designed for combining sequential image processing tasks. We extend U-Net by additional decoding pathways for each individual task, and explore deep cascading of outputs and connectivity from one pathway to another. We demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed approach on denoising and semantic segmentation, as well as on progressive coarse-to-fine semantic segmentation, and achieve better …
