831 research outputs found
Progressive Feature Fusion Network for Realistic Image Dehazing
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 progressive feature fusions has
been proposed to directly learn highly nonlinear transformation function from
observed hazy image to haze-free ground-truth. The proposed network is
evaluated on two public image dehazing benchmarks. The experiments demonstrate
that it can achieve superior performance when compared with popular
state-of-the-art methods. With efficient GPU memory usage, it can
satisfactorily recover ultra high definition hazed image up to 4K resolution,
which is unaffordable by many deep learning based dehazing algorithms.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, 1 tables, accepted by ACCV201
Does Haze Removal Help CNN-based Image Classification?
Hazy images are common in real scenarios and many dehazing methods have been
developed to automatically remove the haze from images. Typically, the goal of
image dehazing is to produce clearer images from which human vision can better
identify the object and structural details present in the images. When the
ground-truth haze-free image is available for a hazy image, quantitative
evaluation of image dehazing is usually based on objective metrics, such as
Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity (SSIM). However, in
many applications, large-scale images are collected not for visual examination
by human. Instead, they are used for many high-level vision tasks, such as
automatic classification, recognition and categorization. One fundamental
problem here is whether various dehazing methods can produce clearer images
that can help improve the performance of the high-level tasks. In this paper,
we empirically study this problem in the important task of image classification
by using both synthetic and real hazy image datasets. From the experimental
results, we find that the existing image-dehazing methods cannot improve much
the image-classification performance and sometimes even reduce the
image-classification performance
Fast Single Image Dehazing via Multilevel Wavelet Transform based Optimization
The quality of images captured in outdoor environments can be affected by
poor weather conditions such as fog, dust, and atmospheric scattering of other
particles. This problem can bring extra challenges to high-level computer
vision tasks like image segmentation and object detection. However, previous
studies on image dehazing suffer from a huge computational workload and
corruption of the original image, such as over-saturation and halos. In this
paper, we present a novel image dehazing approach based on the optical model
for haze images and regularized optimization. Specifically, we convert the
non-convex, bilinear problem concerning the unknown haze-free image and light
transmission distribution to a convex, linear optimization problem by
estimating the atmosphere light constant. Our method is further accelerated by
introducing a multilevel Haar wavelet transform. The optimization, instead, is
applied to the low frequency sub-band decomposition of the original image. This
dimension reduction significantly improves the processing speed of our method
and exhibits the potential for real-time applications. Experimental results
show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art dehazing algorithms in
terms of both image reconstruction quality and computational efficiency. For
implementation details, source code can be publicly accessed via
http://github.com/JiaxiHe/Image-and-Video-Dehazing.Comment: 23 pages, 13 figure
A Cascaded Convolutional Neural Network for Single Image Dehazing
Images captured under outdoor scenes usually suffer from low contrast and
limited visibility due to suspended atmospheric particles, which directly
affects the quality of photos. Despite numerous image dehazing methods have
been proposed, effective hazy image restoration remains a challenging problem.
Existing learning-based methods usually predict the medium transmission by
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), but ignore the key global atmospheric
light. Different from previous learning-based methods, we propose a flexible
cascaded CNN for single hazy image restoration, which considers the medium
transmission and global atmospheric light jointly by two task-driven
subnetworks. Specifically, the medium transmission estimation subnetwork is
inspired by the densely connected CNN while the global atmospheric light
estimation subnetwork is a light-weight CNN. Besides, these two subnetworks are
cascaded by sharing the common features. Finally, with the estimated model
parameters, the haze-free image is obtained by the atmospheric scattering model
inversion, which achieves more accurate and effective restoration performance.
Qualitatively and quantitatively experimental results on the synthetic and
real-world hazy images demonstrate that the proposed method effectively removes
haze from such images, and outperforms several state-of-the-art dehazing
methods.Comment: This manuscript is accepted by IEEE ACCES
Unsupervised Single Image Dehazing Using Dark Channel Prior Loss
Single image dehazing is a critical stage in many modern-day autonomous
vision applications. Early prior-based methods often involved a time-consuming
minimization of a hand-crafted energy function. Recent learning-based
approaches utilize the representational power of deep neural networks (DNNs) to
learn the underlying transformation between hazy and clear images. Due to
inherent limitations in collecting matching clear and hazy images, these
methods resort to training on synthetic data; constructed from indoor images
and corresponding depth information. This may result in a possible domain shift
when treating outdoor scenes. We propose a completely unsupervised method of
training via minimization of the well-known, Dark Channel Prior (DCP) energy
function. Instead of feeding the network with synthetic data, we solely use
real-world outdoor images and tune the network's parameters by directly
minimizing the DCP. Although our "Deep DCP" technique can be regarded as a fast
approximator of DCP, it actually improves its results significantly. This
suggests an additional regularization obtained via the network and learning
process. Experiments show that our method performs on par with large-scale
supervised methods
Single Image Haze Removal using a Generative Adversarial Network
Traditional methods to remove haze from images rely on estimating a
transmission map. When dealing with single images, this becomes an ill-posed
problem due to the lack of depth information. In this paper, we propose an
end-to-end learning based approach which uses a modified conditional Generative
Adversarial Network to directly remove haze from an image. We employ the usage
of the Tiramisu model in place of the classic U-Net model as the generator
owing to its higher parameter efficiency and performance. Moreover, a patch
based discriminator was used to reduce artefacts in the output. To further
improve the perceptual quality of the output, a hybrid weighted loss function
was designed and used to train the model. Experiments on synthetic and real
world hazy images demonstrates that our model performs competitively with the
state of the art methods.Comment: Accepted for the WiSPNET 2020 conference. Please refer to the GitHub
repository for information on updates to the paper:
https://github.com/thatbrguy/Dehaze-GA
Cycle-Dehaze: Enhanced CycleGAN for Single Image Dehazing
In this paper, we present an end-to-end network, called Cycle-Dehaze, for
single image dehazing problem, which does not require pairs of hazy and
corresponding ground truth images for training. That is, we train the network
by feeding clean and hazy images in an unpaired manner. Moreover, the proposed
approach does not rely on estimation of the atmospheric scattering model
parameters. Our method enhances CycleGAN formulation by combining
cycle-consistency and perceptual losses in order to improve the quality of
textural information recovery and generate visually better haze-free images.
Typically, deep learning models for dehazing take low resolution images as
input and produce low resolution outputs. However, in the NTIRE 2018 challenge
on single image dehazing, high resolution images were provided. Therefore, we
apply bicubic downscaling. After obtaining low-resolution outputs from the
network, we utilize the Laplacian pyramid to upscale the output images to the
original resolution. We conduct experiments on NYU-Depth, I-HAZE, and O-HAZE
datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach improves
CycleGAN method both quantitatively and qualitatively.Comment: Accepted at CVPRW: NTIRE 201
Dense Haze: A benchmark for image dehazing with dense-haze and haze-free images
Single image dehazing is an ill-posed problem that has recently drawn
important attention. Despite the significant increase in interest shown for
dehazing over the past few years, the validation of the dehazing methods
remains largely unsatisfactory, due to the lack of pairs of real hazy and
corresponding haze-free reference images. To address this limitation, we
introduce Dense-Haze - a novel dehazing dataset. Characterized by dense and
homogeneous hazy scenes, Dense-Haze contains 33 pairs of real hazy and
corresponding haze-free images of various outdoor scenes. The hazy scenes have
been recorded by introducing real haze, generated by professional haze
machines. The hazy and haze-free corresponding scenes contain the same visual
content captured under the same illumination parameters. Dense-Haze dataset
aims to push significantly the state-of-the-art in single-image dehazing by
promoting robust methods for real and various hazy scenes. We also provide a
comprehensive qualitative and quantitative evaluation of state-of-the-art
single image dehazing techniques based on the Dense-Haze dataset. Not
surprisingly, our study reveals that the existing dehazing techniques perform
poorly for dense homogeneous hazy scenes and that there is still much room for
improvement.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure
DR-Net: Transmission Steered Single Image Dehazing Network with Weakly Supervised Refinement
Despite the recent progress in image dehazing, several problems remain
largely unsolved such as robustness for varying scenes, the visual quality of
reconstructed images, and effectiveness and flexibility for applications. To
tackle these problems, we propose a new deep network architecture for single
image dehazing called DR-Net. Our model consists of three main subnetworks: a
transmission prediction network that predicts transmission map for the input
image, a haze removal network that reconstructs latent image steered by the
transmission map, and a refinement network that enhances the details and color
properties of the dehazed result via weakly supervised learning. Compared to
previous methods, our method advances in three aspects: (i) pure data-driven
model; (ii) the end-to-end system; (iii) superior robustness, accuracy, and
applicability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our DR-Net outperforms
the state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic and real images in qualitative
and quantitative metrics. Additionally, the utility of DR-Net has been
illustrated by its potential usage in several important computer vision tasks.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures, submitted to CVPR 201
Gated Fusion Network for Single Image Dehazing
In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm to directly restore a clear
image from a hazy input. The proposed algorithm hinges on an end-to-end
trainable neural network that consists of an encoder and a decoder. The encoder
is exploited to capture the context of the derived input images, while the
decoder is employed to estimate the contribution of each input to the final
dehazed result using the learned representations attributed to the encoder. The
constructed network adopts a novel fusion-based strategy which derives three
inputs from an original hazy image by applying White Balance (WB), Contrast
Enhancing (CE), and Gamma Correction (GC). We compute pixel-wise confidence
maps based on the appearance differences between these different inputs to
blend the information of the derived inputs and preserve the regions with
pleasant visibility. The final dehazed image is yielded by gating the important
features of the derived inputs. To train the network, we introduce a
multi-scale approach such that the halo artifacts can be avoided. Extensive
experimental results on both synthetic and real-world images demonstrate that
the proposed algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art
algorithms
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