Single image dehazing using deep learning

Many real-world situations such as bad weather may result in hazy environments. Images captured in these hazy conditions will have low image quality due to microparticles in the air. The microparticles light to scatter and absorb, resulting in hazy images with various effects. In recent years, image dehazing has been researched in depth to handle images captured in these conditions. Various methods were developed, from traditional methods to deep learning methods. Traditional methods focus more on the use of statistical prior. These statistical prior have weaknesses in certain conditions. This paper proposes a novel architecture based on PDR-Net by using a pyramid dilated convolution and pre-processing modules, processing modules, post-processing modules, and attention applications. The proposed network is trained to minimize L1 loss and perceptual loss with the O-Haze dataset. To evaluate our architecture's result, we used structural similarity index measure (SSIM), peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), and color difference as an objective assessment and psychovisual experiment as a subjective assessment. Our architecture obtained better results than the previous method using the O-Haze dataset with an SSIM of 0.798, a PSNR of 25.39, but not better on the color difference. The SSIM and PSNR results were strengthened by using subjective assessments and 65 respondents, most of whom chose the results of the restoration of the image produced by our architecture.