Physics-based Feature Dehazing Networks

We propose a physics-based feature dehazing network for image dehazing. In contrast to most existing end-to-end trainable network-based dehazing methods, we explicitly consider the physics model of the haze process in the network design and remove haze in a deep feature space. We propose an effective feature dehazing unit (FDU), which is applied to the deep feature space to explore useful features for image dehazing based on the physics model. The FDU is embedded into an encoder and decoder architecture with residual learning, so that the proposed network can be trained in an end-to-end fashion and effectively help haze removal. The encoder and decoder modules are adopted for feature extraction and clear image reconstruction, respectively. The residual learning is applied to increase the accuracy and ease the training of deep neural networks. We analyze the effectiveness of the proposed network and demonstrate that it can effectively dehaze images with favorable performance against state-of-the-art methods.