Single image dehazing algorithm based on pyramid mutil-scale transposed convolutional network

Abstract

In this paper, a novel single image dehazing method based on pyramid multi-scale transposed convolutional network (MST-Net) is proposed. Conventional haze removal algorithms based on the atmospheric scattering model may lead to some problems such as incomplete dehazing and colour distortion due to the inaccurate parameter approximations or indirect image optimization and reconstruction. Therefore, we design a real end-to-end image dehazing network to directly learn the mapping relationship between hazy images and the corresponding clear images. In this network, the cascaded feature extraction blocks extract the diversified feature information of the input images by multi-channel concatenation structure, which can effectively fuse the local features of the first convolution layer into the semantic features of subsequent layers in the block. In order to reconstruct high-quality dehazed images relieving the colour distortion, we design a multi-scale transposed convolution block to gradually expand the resolution of the obtained feature maps, and introduce skip connections from the feature extraction module to supplement the detailed information of the feature map pyramid. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method in this paper can remove the haze completely and achieve superior performance in subjective and objective evaluation over the other state-of-the-art methods.