ODD-Net: a hybrid deep learning architecture for image dehazing

Haze can significantly reduce visibility and contrast of images captured outdoors, necessitating the enhancement of images. This degradation in image quality can adversely affect various applications, including autonomous driving, object detection, and surveillance, where poor visibility may lead to navigation errors and obscure crucial details. Existing dehazing techniques face several challenges: spatial methods tend to be computationally heavy, transform methods often fall short in quality, hybrid methods can be intricate and demanding, and deep learning methods require extensive datasets and computational power. To overcome these challenges, we present ODD-Net, a hybrid deep learning architecture. Our research introduces a comprehensive data set and an innovative architecture called Atmospheric Light Net (A-Net) to estimate atmospheric light, using dilated convolution, batch normalisation, and ReLU activation functions. Furthermore, we develop T-Net to measure information transmission from objects to the camera, using multiscale convolutions and nonlinear regression to create a transmission map. The integrated architecture combines pre-trained A-Net and T-Net models within the atmospheric scattering model. Comparative analysis shows that ODD-Net provides superior dehazing quality, especially in transmission map estimation and depth measurement, surpassing state-of-the-art methods such as DCP, GMAN, DehazeNet, and LCA. Our quantitative analysis reveals that ODD-Net achieves the highest performance in terms the quality metrics compared. The proposed method demonstrates notable quantitative and qualitative improvements over existing techniques, setting a new standard in image dehazing.