Abstract
Outdoor haze images are typically degraded by noise due to the external
environment and imaging equipment. The existing haze image enhancement
methods ignore the interrelation between haze and noise, which cannot
suppress the noise and remove the haze simultaneously . To address these
intractable problems, a dual-branch architecture that combines dehazing
and denoising is proposed in this paper to restore clear images. First,
we adopt dark channel prior and unsupervised networks in the image
dehazing branch to remove the image blur. Then, the image denoising
branch removes the image noise in parallel by constructing a
mean/extreme sampler and a self-supervised network. Finally, a CNN
fusion strategy is presented to fuse output images from the
aforementioned two branches to generate the final qualified results.
Extensive experiments reveal that the proposed haze image enhancement
method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in terms of PSNR and
SSIM.