Unsupervised water scene dehazing network using multiple scattering model

Abstract

In water scenes, where hazy images are subject to multiple scattering and where ideal data sets are difficult to collect, many dehazing methods are not as effective as they could be. Therefore, an unsupervised water scene dehazing network using atmospheric multiple scattering model is proposed. Unlike previous image dehazing methods, our method uses the unsupervised neural network and the atmospheric multiple scattering model and solves the problem of difficult acquisition of ideal datasets and the effect of multiple scattering on the image. In our method, in order to embed the atmospheric multiple scattering model into the unsupervised dehazing network, the unsupervised dehazing network uses four branches to estimate the scene radiation layer, transmission map layer, blur kernel layer and atmospheric light layer, the hazy image is then synthesized from the four output layers, minimizing the input hazy image and the output hazy image, where the output scene radiation layer is the final dehazing image. In addition, we constructed unsupervised loss functions which applicable to image dehazing by prior knowledge, i.e., color attenuation energy loss and dark channel loss. The method has a wide range of applications, with haze being thick and variable in marine, river and lake scenes, the method can be used to assist ship vision for target detection or forward road recognition in hazy conditions. Through extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world images, the proposed method is able to recover the details, structure and texture of the water image better than five advanced dehazing methods.