Abstract
In hazy weather conditions, a significant accumulation of haze poses a severe challenge to the quality of image capture for autonomous driving systems, thereby heightening safety risks for autonomous vehicles. To tackle this issue, we propose the Multi-scale Refinement Dehazing Network (MRD-Net), an innovative architecture comprising a front-end module, a backbone module, and a tail-end module, specifically designed to eradicate haze with precision. To enhance the extraction of multi-scale features, the backbone module employs the Squeeze-Excitation Residual Dense Block (SRD). It not only learns the intricate multi-scale features of the image but also adaptively recalibrates the feature response of each feature map, ultimately bolstering the network's performance and resilience. The tail-end module, crafted with the Dilation Refinement Block (DRB), serves as a compensatory measure for any detail loss or pseudo-artifacts that might arise from the backbone module's operations. By incorporating this refinement block, the overall dehazing effect is further optimized. Empirical evaluations reveal that the proposed MRD-Net achieves impressive results, with a PSNR value of 28.12, an SSIM value of 0.964, and an LPIPS value of 0.032. These figures indicate that the network is adept at removing haze from images while preserving intricate details, ensuring the efficacy and reliability of autonomous driving systems in hazy environments.