Learning to Dehaze from Realistic Scene with A Fast Physics-based Dehazing Network

Dehazing is a popular computer vision topic for long. A real-time dehazing method with reliable performance is highly desired for many applications such as autonomous driving. While recent learning-based methods require datasets containing pairs of hazy images and clean ground truth references, it is generally impossible to capture accurate ground truth in real scenes. Many existing works compromise this difficulty to generate hazy images by rendering the haze from depth on common RGBD datasets using the haze imaging model. However, there is still a gap between the synthetic datasets and real hazy images as large datasets with high-quality depth are mostly indoor and depth maps for outdoor are imprecise. In this paper, we complement the existing datasets with a new, large, and diverse dehazing dataset containing real outdoor scenes from High-Definition (HD) 3D movies. We select a large number of high-quality frames of real outdoor scenes and render haze on them using depth from stereo. Our dataset is more realistic than existing ones and we demonstrate that using this dataset greatly improves the dehazing performance on real scenes. In addition to the dataset, we also propose a light and reliable dehazing network inspired by the physics model. Our approach outperforms other methods by a large margin and becomes the new state-of-the-art method. Moreover, the light-weight design of the network enables our method to run at a real-time speed, which is much faster than other baseline methods