Single image defogging is a classical and challenging problem in computer vision. Existing methods towards this problem mainly include handcrafted priors based methods that rely on the use of the atmospheric degradation model and learning based approaches that require paired fog-fogfree training example images. In practice, however, prior-based methods are prone to failure due to their own limitations and paired training data are extremely difficult to acquire. Inspired by the principle of CycleGAN network, we have developed an end-to-end learning system that uses unpaired fog and fogfree training images, adversarial discriminators and cycle consistency losses to automatically construct a fog removal system. Similar to CycleGAN, our system has two transformation paths; one maps fog images to a fogfree image domain and the other maps fogfree images to a fog image domain. Instead of one stage mapping, our system uses a two stage mapping strategy in each transformation path to enhance the effectiveness of fog removal. Furthermore, we make explicit use of prior knowledge in the networks by embedding the atmospheric degradation principle and a sky prior for mapping fogfree images to the fog images domain. In addition, we also contribute the first real world nature fog-fogfree image dataset for defogging research. Our multiple real fog images dataset (MRFID) contains images of 200 natural outdoor scenes. For each scene, there are one clear image and corresponding four foggy images of different fog densities manually selected from a sequence of images taken by a fixed camera over the course of one year. Qualitative and quantitative comparison against several state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic and real world images demonstrate that our approach is effective and performs favorably for recovering a clear image from a foggy image.
To address the above problem, networks based on encoder-decoder structure @cite_20 @cite_13 @cite_10 have been used to directly recover clear images. Among these methods, generative adversarial network (GAN) @cite_17 based defogging algorithms have achieved remarkable results. Li @cite_20 modify the basic GAN to directly restore a clear image from a foggy image. However, all these methods required fog-fogfree pair images to train the network. In practice, it is difficult to obtain a large number of paired fog-fogfree images. A method based on CycleGAN @cite_23 has been proposed in @cite_31 where cycle-consistency and VGG perceptual losses are used to directly remove fog. A significant advantage of using CycleGAN is that there is no need to use paired fog-fogfree images to train the system.
@cite_13 @cite_23 @cite_31 @cite_10 @cite_20 @cite_17
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Image-to-image translation is a class of vision and graphics problems where the goal is to learn the mapping between an input image and an output image using a training set of aligned image pairs. However, for many tasks, paired training data will not be available. We present an approach for learning to translate an image from a source domain X to a target domain Y in the absence of paired examples. Our goal is to learn a mapping G : X → Y such that the distribution of images from G(X) is indistinguishable from the distribution Y using an adversarial loss. Because this mapping is highly under-constrained, we couple it with an inverse mapping F : Y → X and introduce a cycle consistency loss to push F(G(X)) ≈ X (and vice versa). Qualitative results are presented on several tasks where paired training data does not exist, including collection style transfer, object transfiguration, season transfer, photo enhancement, etc. Quantitative comparisons against several prior methods demonstrate the superiority of our approach. In this paper, we present an end-to-end network, called Cycle-Dehaze, for single image dehazing problem, which does not require pairs of hazy and corresponding ground truth images for training. That is, we train the network by feeding clean and hazy images in an unpaired manner. Moreover, the proposed approach does not rely on estimation of the atmospheric scattering model parameters. Our method enhances CycleGAN formulation by combining cycle-consistency and perceptual losses in order to improve the quality of textural information recovery and generate visually better haze-free images. Typically, deep learning models for dehazing take low resolution images as input and produce low resolution outputs. However, in the NTIRE 2018 challenge on single image dehazing, high resolution images were provided. Therefore, we apply bicubic downscaling. After obtaining low-resolution outputs from the network, we utilize the Laplacian pyramid to upscale the output images to the original resolution. We conduct experiments on NYU-Depth, I-HAZE, and O-HAZE datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach improves CycleGAN method both quantitatively and qualitatively. We propose a new end-to-end single image dehazing method, called Densely Connected Pyramid Dehazing Network (DCPDN), which can jointly learn the transmission map, atmospheric light and dehazing all together. The end-to-end learning is achieved by directly embedding the atmospheric scattering model into the network, thereby ensuring that the proposed method strictly follows the physics-driven scattering model for dehazing. Inspired by the dense network that can maximize the information flow along features from different levels, we propose a new edge-preserving densely connected encoder-decoder structure with multi-level pyramid pooling module for estimating the transmission map. This network is optimized using a newly introduced edge-preserving loss function. To further incorporate the mutual structural information between the estimated transmission map and the dehazed result, we propose a joint-discriminator based on generative adversarial network framework to decide whether the corresponding dehazed image and the estimated transmission map are real or fake. An ablation study is conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of each module evaluated at both estimated transmission map and dehazed result. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-art methods. Code and dataset is made available at: https: github.com hezhangsprinter DCPDN In this paper, we present an algorithm to directly restore a clear image from a hazy image. This problem is highly ill-posed and most existing algorithms often use hand-crafted features, e.g., dark channel, color disparity, maximum contrast, to estimate transmission maps and then atmospheric lights. In contrast, we solve this problem based on a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN), where the clear image is estimated by an end-to-end trainable neural network. Different from the generative network in basic cGAN, we propose an encoder and decoder architecture so that it can generate better results. To generate realistic clear images, we further modify the basic cGAN formulation by introducing the VGG features and an L1-regularized gradient prior. We also synthesize a hazy dataset including indoor and outdoor scenes to train and evaluate the proposed algorithm. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic dataset and real world hazy images. We propose a new framework for estimating generative models via an adversarial process, in which we simultaneously train two models: a generative model G that captures the data distribution, and a discriminative model D that estimates the probability that a sample came from the training data rather than G. The training procedure for G is to maximize the probability of D making a mistake. This framework corresponds to a minimax two-player game. In the space of arbitrary functions G and D, a unique solution exists, with G recovering the training data distribution and D equal to ½ everywhere. In the case where G and D are defined by multilayer perceptrons, the entire system can be trained with backpropagation. There is no need for any Markov chains or unrolled approximate inference networks during either training or generation of samples. Experiments demonstrate the potential of the framework through qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the generated samples.