PEDNet: Physics-guided EncoderDecoder Network for Image Dehazing

We propose a new convolutional neural network called Physics-guided Encoder–Decoder Network (PEDNet) designed for end-to-end single image dehazing. The network uses a reformulated atmospheric scattering model, which is embedded into the network for end-to-end learning. The overall structure is in the form of an encoder–decoder, which fully extracts and fuses contextual information from four different scales through skip connections. In addition, in view of the uneven spread of haze in the real world, we design a Res2FA module based on Res2Net, which introduces a Feature Attention block that is able to focus on important information at a finer granularity. The PEDNet is more adaptable when handling various hazy image types since it employs a physically driven dehazing model. The efficacy of every network module is demonstrated by ablation experiment results. Our suggested solution is superior to current state-of-the-art methods according to experimental results from both synthetic and real-world datasets.