Progressive Update Guided Interdependent Networks for Single Image Dehazing

Images with haze of different varieties often pose a significant challenge to dehazing. Therefore, guidance by estimates of haze parameters related to the variety would be beneficial and their progressive update jointly with haze reduction will allow effective dehazing. To this end, we propose a multi-network dehazing framework containing novel interdependent dehazing and haze parameter updater networks that operate in a progressive manner. The haze parameters, transmission map and atmospheric light, are first estimated using specific convolutional networks allowing color-cast handling. The estimated parameters are then used to guide our dehazing module, where the estimates are progressively updated by novel convolutional networks. The updating takes place jointly with progressive dehazing by a convolutional network that invokes inter-step dependencies. The joint progressive updating and dehazing gradually modify the haze parameter estimates toward achieving effective dehazing. Through different studies, our dehazing framework is shown to be more effective than image-to-image mapping or predefined haze formation model based dehazing. Our dehazing framework is qualitatively and quantitatively found to outperform the state-of-the-art on synthetic and real-world hazy images of several datasets with varied haze conditions.