Images captured in haze conditions, especially at nighttime with low light, often suffer from degraded visibility, contrasts, and vividness, which makes it difficult to carry out the following vision tasks. In this article, we propose an attention-based feature fusion network (AFF-Dehazing) for low-light image dehazing. Our method decomposes the low-light image dehazing into two task-independent streams containing four modules: image dehazing module, low-light feature extractor module, feature fusion module, and image restoration module. The basic block of these modules is the proposed attention-based residual dense block. Since the dual-branch are used, AFF-Dehazing can avoid learning the mixed degradation all-in-one and enhance the details of low-light haze images. Extensive experiments show that our method surpasses previous state-of-the-art image dehazing methods and low-light enhancement methods by a very large margin both quantitatively and qualitatively. K E Y W O R D S attention mechanism, image dehazing, low-light enhancement
INTRODUCTIONHaze is common atmospheric phenomenon and often plagues the qualities of the images acquired by the cameras. While, at night with low light, the images further face severe degradations, including low visibility and intensity blurs. Recently, many efforts have been made to solve the problems of image dehazing and low-light image enhancement. However, existing methods dealt with the problems of image dehazing and low-light enhancement separately. These methods can achieve relatively good performance on corrupted images when removing a certain target type of distortion (i.e., haze or low-light), but they are not effective in removing both types of distortions.