Holistic Attention-Fusion Adversarial Network for Single Image Defogging

Adversarial learning-based image defogging methods have been extensively studied in computer vision due to their remarkable performance. However, most existing methods have limited defogging capabilities for real cases because they are trained on the paired clear and synthesized foggy images of the same scenes. In addition, they have limitations in preserving vivid color and rich textual details in defogging. To address these issues, we develop a novel generative adversarial network, called holistic attention-fusion adversarial network (HAAN), for single image defogging. HAAN consists of a Fog2Fogfree block and a Fogfree2Fog block. In each block, there are three learning-based modules, namely, fog removal, color-texture recovery, and fog synthetic, that are constrained each other to generate high quality images. HAAN is designed to exploit the self-similarity of texture and structure information by learning the holistic channel-spatial feature correlations between the foggy image with its several derived images. Moreover, in the fog synthetic module, we utilize the atmospheric scattering model to guide it to improve the generative quality by focusing on an atmospheric light optimization with a novel sky segmentation network. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that HAAN outperforms state-of-the-art defogging methods in terms of quantitative accuracy and subjective visual quality.