A Light Dual-Task Neural Network for Haze Removal

Yu Zhang, Xinchao Wang, Xiaojun Bi, Dacheng Tao
2018 IEEE Signal Processing Letters  
Single-image dehazing is a challenging problem due to its ill-posed nature. Existing methods rely on a suboptimal two-step approach, where an intermediate product like a depth map is estimated, based on which the haze-free image is subsequently generated using an artificial prior formula. In this paper, we propose a light dual-task Neural Network called LDTNet that restores the haze-free image in one shot. We use transmission map estimation as an auxiliary task to assist the main task, haze
more » ... val, in feature extraction and to enhance the generalization of the network. In LDTNet, the haze-free image and the transmission map are produced simultaneously. As a result, the artificial prior is reduced to the smallest extent. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our algorithm achieves superior performance against the state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic and real-world images.
doi:10.1109/lsp.2018.2849681 fatcat:3zirwmvblbcfdblcq5mfbflaku