Structure-transferring edge-enhanced grid dehazing network

Abstract

The problem of image dehazing has received a great deal of attention in the computer vision community over the past two decades. Under haze conditions, due to the scattering of water vapor and dust particles in the air, the sharpness of the image is seriously reduced, making it difficult for many computer vision systems, such as those for object detection, object recognition, surveillance, driver assistance, etc. to do further process and operation. However, the previous dehazing methods usually have shortcomings such as poor brightness, color cast, removal of uncleanliness, halos, artifacts, and blurring. To address these problems, we propose a novel Structure-transferring Edge-enhanced Grid Dehazing Network (SEGDNet) in this study. An edge-preserving smoothing operator, a guided filter, is used to efficiently decompose the images into low-frequency image structure and high-frequency edges. The Low-frequency Grid Dehazing Subnetwork (LGDSn) is proposed to effectively preserve the low-frequency structure while dehazing. The High-frequency Edge Enhancement Subnetwork (HEESn) is also proposed to enhance the edges and details while removing the noise. The Low-and-High frequency Fusion Subnetwork (L&HFSn) is used to fuse the low-frequency and high-frequency results to obtain the final dehazed image. The experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations.