Decoupling While Coupling: Towards More Accurate Stereo Image Sand Removal Beyond Certainty

Stereo image sand removal is crucial to improve the perceptual quality for autonomous driving perception. Existing methods often fall short in accurately estimating the uncertainty inherent in degraded images, leading to suboptimal outcomes. To address this, we introduce a novel framework named Decoupling While Coupling(DWC). DWC pioneers the integration of inter-view uncertainty estimation, cross-view uncertainty-aware interaction and block-wise uncertainty representation for superior stereo image sand removal. For cross-view information interaction, we propose an Uncertainty-aware Cross-view Attentive Interaction module(UCAI) to cope with the lack of uncertainty estimation ability in the existing cross-view information interaction mechanism. For the uncertainty perception and information interaction within the inter-view, we propose a Distribution Modeling Coupling Block(DMCB), which transmits the representation of uncertainty between each backbone module. For block-wise uncertainty estimation, we use our proposed Uncertainty-aware Distribution Feature Modulator(UDFM) as the backbone of DWC to modulate the uncertainty inside the neural network itself. Extensive experimental validations on our proposed stereo image sand removal dataset SandST confirm the efficacy of DWC. Our method not only achieves higher PSNR and SSIM, but also exhibits enhanced robustness against various sand degrees and patterns.