Self-Iteration Image Haze Removal Using a Deep Curve-Dehazing Model
Wei Liu, Rui Nan, Jiayi Ma, Xin Chen, Guoping Qiu · IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology · 2025
This paper proposes a novel dehazing method termed Haze-Restoration Curve Model (HRCM), which transforms the single-image dehazing task into a specific curve estimation problem, achieving haze removal through an intuitive and simple nonlinear curve mapping. Unlike methods based on Atmospheric Scattering Model (ASM), HRCM does not require the computation of complex physical parameters. Instead, it estimates two intuitive curvature adjustment coefficients. Moreover, compared to recent end-to-end dehazing methods, HRCM circumvents the challenging modeling of static mapping functions, thereby improving the generalization ability and dehazing performance of the model. All of these are attributed to a meticulously designed dehazing curve, which first reversing the hazy image to highlight obscured regions, and then specifies a set of high-order functions to remap hazy pixels for image restoration. Moreover, to estimate the curve parameters, we designed a dual-branch Deep Dehaze Curve Estimation Network(DDCEN), which consists of the Residual Swin Transformer Block(RTSB) and the Large kernel convolutional Attention Block(LAB). Specifically, RTSB captures the global fog density distribution features of foggy images by introducing window self-attention and shifted window mechanisms, providing support for global semantic information for subsequent parameter estimation. LAB captures local multi-scale features by constructing a large receptive field, and uses the attention mechanism of feature pooling in horizontal and vertical directions to focus on detail regions, refining the local details of the parameter map. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world hazy image datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves superior performance in terms of quantitative accuracy and subjective visual quality compared to the current state-of-the-art methods. The source code of our HRCM is available at https://github.com/larrylanrui/HRCM.