Image dehazing based on (CMTnet) cascaded multi-scale convolutional neural networks and efficient light estimation algorithm

Abstract

Image dehazing plays a pivotal role in numerous computer vision applications such as object recognition, surveillance systems, and security systems, where it can be considered as an introductory stage. Recently, many proposed learning-based works address this significant task; however, most of them neglect the atmospheric light estimation and fail to produce accurate transmission maps. To address such a problem, in this paper, we propose a two-stage dehazing system. The first stage presents an accurate atmospheric light algorithm labeled "A-Est" that employs hazy image blurriness and quadtree decomposition. Te second stage represents a cascaded multi-scale CNN model called CMTnet that consists of two subnetworks, one for calculating rough transmission maps (CMCNNtr) and the other for its refinement (CMCNNt). Each subnetwork is composed of three-layer D-units (D indicates dense). Experimental analysis and comparisons with state-of-the-art dehazing methods revealed that the proposed system can estimate AL and t efficiently and accurately by achieving high-quality dehazing results and outperforms state-of-the-art comparative methods according to SSIM and MSE values, where our proposed achieves the best scores of both (91% average SSIM and 0.068 average MSE).