A Novel Encoder-Decoder Network with Guided Transmission Map for Single Image Dehazing
This work addresses image quality degradation due to haze, which is a problem for applications like autonomous driving, though it is incremental as it builds on existing deep learning and prior methods.
The paper tackles single image dehazing by proposing an encoder-decoder network with a guided transmission map, achieving state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets in terms of PSNR and SSIM metrics, and improving object detection accuracy by 4.73% mAP when used as a preprocessing tool.
A novel Encoder-Decoder Network with Guided Transmission Map (EDN-GTM) for single image dehazing scheme is proposed in this paper. The proposed EDN-GTM takes conventional RGB hazy image in conjunction with its transmission map estimated by adopting dark channel prior as the inputs of the network. The proposed EDN-GTM utilizes U-Net for image segmentation as the core network and utilizes various modifications including spatial pyramid pooling module and Swish activation to achieve state-of-the-art dehazing performance. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that the proposed EDN-GTM outperforms most of traditional and deep learning-based image dehazing schemes in terms of PSNR and SSIM metrics. The proposed EDN-GTM furthermore proves its applicability to object detection problems. Specifically, when applied to an image preprocessing tool for driving object detection, the proposed EDN-GTM can efficiently remove haze and significantly improve detection accuracy by 4.73% in terms of mAP measure. The code is available at: https://github.com/tranleanh/edn-gtm.