DCAF-Net: Density-Conditioned Attention Fusion Network for Single-Image Dehazing
Nianfeng Li, S. Liu, Hongjie Ding, Shenyan Gao, Zhiguo Xiao, Qian Liu · Sensors · 2026
Single-image dehazing aims to recover clear scenes from degraded images affected by atmospheric scattering, serving as a critical preprocessing technique for improving the imaging quality of visual sensors. Existing deep learning-based dehazing methods exhibit limited generalization ability in real-world scenarios, primarily due to the spatial non-uniformity of haze and its coupling with illumination and texture degradation, as well as the scarcity of real paired data. To address these issues, this paper proposes a haze-density conditional attention fusion network (DCAF-Net). The network employs an adaptive haze density perception module to fuse priors such as the dark channel, local contrast, and saturation, generating a spatial haze density guidance map. This map is then embedded as conditional information into the multi-scale feature modulation and attention fusion process, enabling adaptive restoration of regions with different degradation levels. Furthermore, a residual dense cascaded feature enhancement module is designed to leverage feature reuse, gated fusion, and residual learning to enhance the representational capacity of deep features. Training adopts a joint optimization objective combining Charbonnier reconstruction loss, perceptual contrast loss, and structural similarity loss. Experimental results demonstrate that DCAF-Net achieves competitive performance against representative methods on multiple synthetic and real-world hazy datasets, and shows promising restoration performance on representative real-world hazy scenes, and can provide high-quality image preprocessing support for visual-sensor-based intelligent perception systems.