Single Image Dehazing through Improved Atmospheric Light Estimation

Image contrast enhancement for outdoor vision is important for smart car auxiliary transport systems. The video frames captured in poor weather conditions are often characterized by poor visibility. Most image dehazing algorithms consider to use a hard threshold assumptions or user input to estimate atmospheric light. However, the brightest pixels sometimes are objects such as car lights or streetlights, especially for smart car auxiliary transport systems. Simply using a hard threshold may cause a wrong estimation. In this paper, we propose a single optimized image dehazing method that estimates atmospheric light efficiently and removes haze through the estimation of a semi-globally adaptive filter. The enhanced images are characterized with little noise and good exposure in dark regions. The textures and edges of the processed images are also enhanced significantly.Comment: Multimedia Tools and Applications (2015

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

Image Dehazing using Bilinear Composition Loss Function

In this paper, we introduce a bilinear composition loss function to address the problem of image dehazing. Previous methods in image dehazing use a two-stage approach which first estimate the transmission map followed by clear image estimation. The drawback of a two-stage method is that it tends to boost local image artifacts such as noise, aliasing and blocking. This is especially the case for heavy haze images captured with a low quality device. Our method is based on convolutional neural networks. Unique in our method is the bilinear composition loss function which directly model the correlations between transmission map, clear image, and atmospheric light. This allows errors to be back-propagated to each sub-network concurrently, while maintaining the composition constraint to avoid overfitting of each sub-network. We evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed method using both synthetic and real world examples. Extensive experiments show that our method outperfoms state-of-the-art methods especially for haze images with severe noise level and compressions

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

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

Haze Visibility Enhancement: A Survey and Quantitative Benchmarking

This paper provides a comprehensive survey of methods dealing with visibility enhancement of images taken in hazy or foggy scenes. The survey begins with discussing the optical models of atmospheric scattering media and image formation. This is followed by a survey of existing methods, which are grouped to multiple image methods, polarizing filters based methods, methods with known depth, and single-image methods. We also provide a benchmark of a number of well known single-image methods, based on a recent dataset provided by Fattal and our newly generated scattering media dataset that contains ground truth images for quantitative evaluation. To our knowledge, this is the first benchmark using numerical metrics to evaluate dehazing techniques. This benchmark allows us to objectively compare the results of existing methods and to better identify the strengths and limitations of each method

An All-in-One Network for Dehazing and Beyond

This paper proposes an image dehazing model built with a convolutional neural network (CNN), called All-in-One Dehazing Network (AOD-Net). It is designed based on a re-formulated atmospheric scattering model. Instead of estimating the transmission matrix and the atmospheric light separately as most previous models did, AOD-Net directly generates the clean image through a light-weight CNN. Such a novel end-to-end design makes it easy to embed AOD-Net into other deep models, e.g., Faster R-CNN, for improving high-level task performance on hazy images. Experimental results on both synthesized and natural hazy image datasets demonstrate our superior performance than the state-of-the-art in terms of PSNR, SSIM and the subjective visual quality. Furthermore, when concatenating AOD-Net with Faster R-CNN and training the joint pipeline from end to end, we witness a large improvement of the object detection performance on hazy images

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

Benchmarking Single Image Dehazing and Beyond

We present a comprehensive study and evaluation of existing single image dehazing algorithms, using a new large-scale benchmark consisting of both synthetic and real-world hazy images, called REalistic Single Image DEhazing (RESIDE). RESIDE highlights diverse data sources and image contents, and is divided into five subsets, each serving different training or evaluation purposes. We further provide a rich variety of criteria for dehazing algorithm evaluation, ranging from full-reference metrics, to no-reference metrics, to subjective evaluation and the novel task-driven evaluation. Experiments on RESIDE shed light on the comparisons and limitations of state-of-the-art dehazing algorithms, and suggest promising future directions.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Image Processing(TIP 2019

Joint Defogging and Demosaicking

Image defogging is a technique used extensively for enhancing visual quality of images in bad weather condition. Even though defogging algorithms have been well studied, defogging performance is degraded by demosaicking artifacts and sensor noise amplification in distant scenes. In order to improve visual quality of restored images, we propose a novel approach to perform defogging and demosaicking simultaneously. We conclude that better defogging performance with fewer artifacts can be achieved when a defogging algorithm is combined with a demosaicking algorithm simultaneously. We also demonstrate that the proposed joint algorithm has the benefit of suppressing noise amplification in distant scene. In addition, we validate our theoretical analysis and observations for both synthesized datasets with ground truth fog-free images and natural scene datasets captured in a raw format