Lightweight and Efficient Image Dehazing Network Guided by Transmission Estimation from Real-World Hazy Scenes

In this paper, a transmission-guided lightweight neural network called TGL-Net is proposed for efficient image dehazing. Unlike most current dehazing methods that produce simulated transmission maps from depth data and haze-free images, in the proposed work, guided transmission maps are computed automatically using a filter-refined dark-channel-prior (F-DCP) method from real-world hazy images as a regularizer, which facilitates network training not only on synthetic data, but also on natural images. A double-error loss function that combines the errors of a transmission map with the errors of a dehazed image is used to guide network training. The method provides a feasible solution for introducing priors obtained from traditional non-learning-based image processing techniques as a guide for training deep neural networks. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that, in terms of several reference and non-reference evaluation criteria for real-world images, the proposed method can achieve state-of-the-art performance with a much smaller network size and with significant improvements in efficiency resulting from the training guidance.