Frequency-Oriented Transformer for Remote Sensing Image Dehazing

Abstract

Remote sensing images are inevitably affected by the degradation of haze with complex appearance and non-uniform distribution, which remarkably affects the effectiveness of downstream remote sensing visual tasks. However, most current methods principally operate in the original pixel space of the image, which hinders the exploration of the frequency characteristics of remote sensing images, resulting in these models failing to fully exploit their representation ability to produce high-quality images. This paper proposes a frequency-oriented remote sensing dehazing Transformer named FOTformer, to explore information in the frequency domain to eliminate disturbances caused by haze in remote sensing images. It contains three components. Specifically, we developed a frequency-prompt attention evaluator to estimate the self-correlation of features in the frequency domain rather than the spatial domain, improving the image restoration performance. We propose a content reconstruction feed-forward network that captures information between different scales in features and integrates and processes global frequency domain information and local multi-scale spatial information in Fourier space to reconstruct the global content under the guidance of the amplitude spectrum. We designed a spatial-frequency aggregation block to exchange and fuse features from the frequency domain and spatial domain of the encoder and decoder to facilitate the propagation of features from the encoder stream to the decoder and alleviate the problem of information loss in the network. The experimental results show that the FOTformer achieved a more competitive performance against other remote sensing dehazing methods on commonly used benchmark datasets.