Depth-Guided Dehazing Network for Long-Range Aerial Scenes

Abstract

Over the past few years, the applications of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have greatly increased. However, the decrease in clarity in hazy environments is an important constraint on their further development. Current research on image dehazing mainly focuses on normal scenes at close range or mid-range, while ignoring long-range scenes such as aerial perspective. Furthermore, based on the atmospheric scattering model, the inclusion of depth information is essential for the procedure of image dehazing, especially when dealing with images that exhibit substantial variations in depth. However, most existing models neglect this important information. Consequently, these state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods perform inadequately in dehazing when applied to long-range images. For the purpose of dealing with the above challenges, we propose the construction of a depth-guided dehazing network designed specifically for long-range aerial scenes. Initially, we introduce the depth prediction subnetwork to accurately extract depth information from long-range aerial images, taking into account the substantial variance in haze density. Subsequently, we propose the depth-guided attention module, which integrates a depth map with dehazing features through the attention mechanism, guiding the dehazing process and enabling the effective removal of haze in long-range areas. Furthermore, considering the unique characteristics of long-range aerial scenes, we introduce the UAV-HAZE dataset, specifically designed for training and evaluating dehazing methods in such scenarios. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to test our method against several SOTA dehazing methods and demonstrate its superiority over others.