Image Dehazing Based on Local and Non-Local Features

Image dehazing is a traditional task, yet it still presents arduous problems, especially in the removal of haze from the texture and edge information of an image. The state-of-the-art dehazing methods may result in the loss of some visual informative details and a decrease in visual quality. To improve dehazing quality, a novel dehazing model is proposed, based on a fractional derivative and data-driven regularization terms. In this model, the contrast constrained adaptive histogram equalization method is used as the data fidelity item; the fractional derivative is applied to avoid over-enhancement and noise amplification; and the proposed data-driven regularization terms are adopted to extract the local and non-local features of an image. Then, to solve the proposed model, half-quadratic splitting is used. Moreover, a dual-stream network based on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Transformer is introduced to structure the data-driven regularization. Further, to estimate the atmospheric light, an atmospheric light model based on the fractional derivative and the atmospheric veil is proposed. Extensive experiments display the effectiveness of the proposed method, which surpasses the state-of-the-art methods for most synthetic and real-world images, quantitatively and qualitatively.