An enhanced pix2pix dehazing network with guided filter layer

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an enhanced pix2pix dehazing network, which generates clear images without relying on a physical scattering model. This network is a generative adversarial network (GAN) which combines multiple guided filter layers. First, the input of hazy images is smoothed to obtain high-frequency features according to different smoothing kernels of the guided filter layer. Then, these features are embedded in higher dimensions of the network and connected with the output of the generator's encoder. Finally, Visual Geometry Group (VGG) features are introduced to serve as a loss function to improve the quality of the texture information restoration and generate better hazy-free images. We conduct experiments on NYU-Depth, I-HAZE and O-HAZE datasets. The enhanced pix2pix dehazing network we propose produces increases of 1.22 dB in the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and 0.01 in the Structural Similarity Index Metric (SSIM) compared with a second successful comparison method using the indoor test dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method has good performance for image dehazing.