# Semi-UFormer: Semi-supervised Uncertainty-aware Transformer for Image Dehazing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.16057 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.16057/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in General knowledge distillation methods, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 17 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Oct 2022.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [General knowledge distillation methods](https://mlsanity.com/distill/general-knowledge-distillation-methods/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Benchmarking Single Image Dehazing and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04143/) (2017)
- [Domain Adaptive Faster R-CNN for Object Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03243/) (2018)
- [DehazeNet: An End-to-End System for Single Image Haze Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.07661/) (2016)
- [FFA-Net: Feature Fusion Attention Network for Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07559/) (2019)
- [Vision Transformers for Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03883/) (2022)
- [Bayesian Convolutional Neural Networks with Bernoulli Approximate Variational Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02158/) (2015)
- [Gated Context Aggregation Network for Image Dehazing and Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08747/) (2018)
- [Practical Blind Image Denoising via Swin-Conv-UNet and Data Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13278/) (2022)
- [Cycle-Dehaze: Enhanced CycleGAN for Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.05308/) (2018)
- [You Only Look Yourself: Unsupervised and Untrained Single Image Dehazing Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16829/) (2020)
- [Uncertainty Inspired Underwater Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09689/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Domain-Specific Deblurring via Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.01594/) (2019)
- [TRT-ViT: TensorRT-oriented Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09579/) (2022)
- [Dual-Scale Single Image Dehazing Via Neural Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05913/) (2022)
- [Gated Fusion Network for Degraded Image Super Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00893/) (2020)
- [Robust Deep Ensemble Method for Real-world Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03691/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Sparse Sampling Transformer with Uncertainty-Driven Ranking for Unified Removal of Raindrops and Rain Streaks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14153/) (2023)
- [Real-world Image Dehazing with Coherence-based Pseudo Labeling and Cooperative Unfolding Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07966/) (2024)
- [Dehazing Remote Sensing and UAV Imagery: A Review of Deep Learning, Prior-based, and Hybrid Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07520/) (2024)
- [PRISM: Rethinking Atmospheric Scattering Reconstruction as a Unified Understanding and Restoration Model for Real-world Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07048/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Image dehazing is fundamental yet not well-solved in computer vision. Most cutting-edge models are trained in synthetic data, leading to the poor performance on real-world hazy scenarios. Besides, they commonly give deterministic dehazed images while neglecting to mine their uncertainty. To bridge the domain gap and enhance the dehazing performance, we propose a novel semi-supervised uncertainty-aware transformer network, called Semi-UFormer. Semi-UFormer can well leverage both the real-world hazy images and their uncertainty guidance information. Specifically, Semi-UFormer builds itself on the knowledge distillation framework. Such teacher-student networks effectively absorb real-world haze information for quality dehazing. Furthermore, an uncertainty estimation block is introduced into the model to estimate the pixel uncertainty representations, which is then used as a guidance signal to help the student network produce haze-free images more accurately. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Semi-UFormer generalizes well from synthetic to real-world images.