Deep Retinex Network for Single Image Dehazing

In this paper, we propose a retinex-based decomposition model for a hazy image and a novel end-to-end image dehazing network. In the model, the illumination of the hazy image is decomposed into natural illumination for the haze-free image and residual illumination caused by haze. Based on this model, we design a deep retinex dehazing network (RDN) to jointly estimate the residual illumination map and the haze-free image. Our RDN consists of a multiscale residual dense network for estimating the residual illumination map and a U-Net with channel and spatial attention mechanisms for image dehazing. The multiscale residual dense network can simultaneously capture global contextual information from small-scale receptive fields and local detailed information from large-scale receptive fields to precisely estimate the residual illumination map caused by haze. In the dehazing U-Net, we apply the channel and spatial attention mechanisms in the skip connection of the U-Net to achieve a trade-off between overdehazing and underdehazing by automatically adjusting the channel-wise and pixel-wise attention weights. Compared with scattering model-based networks, fully data-driven networks, and prior-based dehazing methods, our RDN can avoid the errors associated with the simplified scattering model and provide better generalization ability with no dependence on prior information. Extensive experiments show the superiority of the RDN to various state-of-the-art methods.