Single image dehazing using attention layers in convolutional neural networks

Abstract

A hazy image is characterized by atmospheric conditions that reduce the image’s clarity and contrast, thereby making it less visible. This degradation in image quality can hinder the performance of advanced computer vision tasks such as object detection and identifying open spaces which need to perform with high accuracy in important real world applications such as security surveillance and autonomous driving. In the recent past, the use of deep learning in image processing tasks have shown a remarkable improvement in performance, in particular, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) perform superior to any other type of neural network in image related tasks. In this paper, we propose the addition of Channel Attention and Pixel Attention layers to four state-of-the-art CNNs, namely, GMAN, U-Net, 123-CEDH and DMPHN, used for the task of image dehazing. We show that the addition of these layers yields a non-trivial improvement on the quality of the dehazed images which we show qualitatively with examples and quantitatively by obtaining PSNR and SSIM scores of 28.63 and 0.959 respectively. Through the experiments, we show that the addition of the mentioned attention layers to the GMAN architecture yields the best results.