Recurrent Context Aggregation Network for Single Image Dehazing

Chen Wang, Runqing Chen, Yang Lu, Yan Yan, Hanzi Wang

Abstract: Existing learning-based dehazing methods are prone to cause excessive dehazing and failure to dense haze, mainly because that the global features of hazy images are not fully utilized, while the local features of hazy images are not enough discriminative. In this letter, we propose a Recurrent Context Aggregation Network (RCAN) to effectively dehaze images and restore color fidelity. In RCAN, an efficient and generic module, called Context Aggression Block (CAB), is designed to improve the feature representation by taking advantage of both global and local features, which are complementary for robust dehazing because that local features can capture different levels of haze, and global features can focus on textures and object edges of a whole image. In addition, RCAN adopts a deep recurrent mechanism to improve the dehazing performance without introducing additional network parameters. Extensive experimental results on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that the proposed RCAN performs better than other state-of-the-art dehazing methods.