Abstract
PROBLEM: Deep learning technology promotes the development of single-image dehazing. However, many existing methods fail to fully consider the haze density and its spatial distribution, which limits the improvement of dehazing performance. PROPOSED SOLUTION: To address this issue, we propose an attention-based multi-scale feature aggregation network (AMSA-Net) for single-image dehazing. METHOD: AMSA-Net is an encoding and decoding structure. Its encoder and decoder are composed of multi-scale hybrid attention feature aggregation module (MSHA-FAM). The module can perceive the haze density and spatial information in the haze image, which helps to improve the dehazing effect. MSHA-FAM is composed of two key components: the scale-aware coordinate residual module (SCRM) and multi-scale feature refinement residual module (MSFRRM). SCRM uses improved coordinate attention to effectively capture haze density and spatial characteristics, thus significantly improving dehazing effect. MSFRRM extracts semantic features through up-sampling and down-sampling, and uses improved pixel attention mechanism to enhance key features. In the overall MSHA-FAM pipeline, SCRM first learns the density and spatial distribution characteristics of haze, then refines it through MSFRRM, so as to remove haze more effectively. KEY RESULTS: The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed AMSA-Net is superior to the comparison methods in terms of dehazing quality. Ablation studies further verify the effectiveness of the proposed modules. IMPACT: In this work, we present AMSA-Net, which has achieved good dehazing performance and can provide high-quality input for subsequent computer vision tasks.