AIDEDNet: anti-interference and detail enhancement dehazing network for real-world scenes

The haze phenomenon seriously interferes the image acquisition and reduces image quality. Due to many uncertain factors, dehazing is typically a challenge in image processing. The most existing deep learning-based dehazing approaches apply the atmospheric scattering model (ASM) or a similar physical model, which originally comes from traditional dehazing methods. However, the data set trained in deep learning does not match well this model for three reasons. Firstly, the atmospheric illumination in ASM is obtained from prior experience, which is not accurate for dehazing real-scene. Secondly, it is difficult to get the depth of outdoor scenes for ASM. Thirdly, the haze is a complex natural phenomenon, and it is difficult to find an accurate physical model and related parameters to describe this phenomenon. In this paper, we propose a black box method, in which the haze is considered an image quality problem without using any physical model such as ASM. Analytically, we propose a novel dehazing equation to combine two mechanisms: interference item and detail enhancement item. The interference item estimates the haze information for dehazing the image, and then the detail enhancement item can repair and enhance the details of the dehazed image. Based on the new equation, we design an anti-interference and detail enhancement dehazing network (AIDEDNet), which is dramatically different from existing dehazing networks in that our network is fed into the haze-free images for training. Specifically, we propose a new way to construct a haze patch on the flight of network training. The patch is randomly selected from the input images and the thickness of haze is also randomly set. Numerous experiment results show that AIDEDNet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic haze scenes and real-world haze scenes.