Complementary Feature Enhanced Network with Vision Transformer for Image Dehazing

Conventional CNNs-based dehazing models suffer from two essential issues: the dehazing framework (limited in interpretability) and the convolution layers (content-independent and ineffective to learn long-range dependency information). In this paper, firstly, we propose a new complementary feature enhanced framework, in which the complementary features are learned by several complementary subtasks and then together serve to boost the performance of the primary task. One of the prominent advantages of the new framework is that the purposively chosen complementary tasks can focus on learning weakly dependent complementary features, avoiding repetitive and ineffective learning of the networks. We design a new dehazing network based on such a framework. Specifically, we select the intrinsic image decomposition as the complementary tasks, where the reflectance and shading prediction subtasks are used to extract the color-wise and texture-wise complementary features. To effectively aggregate these complementary features, we propose a complementary features selection module (CFSM) to select the more useful features for image dehazing. Furthermore, we introduce a new version of vision transformer block, named Hybrid Local-Global Vision Transformer (HyLoG-ViT), and incorporate it within our dehazing networks. The HyLoG-ViT block consists of the local and the global vision transformer paths used to capture local and global dependencies. As a result, the HyLoG-ViT introduces locality in the networks and captures the global and long-range dependencies. Extensive experiments on homogeneous, non-homogeneous, and nighttime dehazing tasks reveal that the proposed dehazing network can achieve comparable or even better performance than CNNs-based dehazing models.