A Cascaded Convolutional Neural Network for Single Image Dehazing

Images captured under outdoor scenes usually suffer from low contrast and limited visibility due to suspended atmospheric particles, which directly affects the quality of photographs. Despite numerous image dehazing methods have been proposed, effective hazy image restoration remains a challenging problem. Existing learning-based methods usually predict the medium transmission by convolutional neural networks (CNNs), but ignore the key global atmospheric light. Different from previous learning-based methods, we propose a flexible cascaded CNN for single hazy image restoration, which considers the medium transmission and global atmospheric light jointly by two task-driven subnetworks. Specifically, the medium transmission estimation subnetwork is inspired by the densely connected CNN while the global atmospheric light estimation subnetwork is a light-weight CNN. Besides, these two subnetworks are cascaded by sharing the common features. Finally, with the estimated model parameters, the haze-free image is obtained by the atmospheric scattering model inversion, which achieves more accurate and effective restoration performance. Qualitatively and quantitatively experimental results on the synthetic and real-world hazy images demonstrate that the proposed method effectively removes haze from such images, and outperforms several state-of-the-art dehazing methods.