High-quality Image Dehazing with Diffusion Model

Image dehazing is quite challenging in dense-haze scenarios, where quite less original information remains in the hazy image. Though previous methods have made marvelous progress, they still suffer from information loss in content and color in dense-haze scenarios. The recently emerged Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) exhibits strong generation ability, showing potential for solving this problem. However, DDPM fails to consider the physics property of dehazing task, limiting its information completion capacity. In this work, we propose DehazeDDPM: A DDPM-based and physics-aware image dehazing framework that applies to complex hazy scenarios. Specifically, DehazeDDPM works in two stages. The former stage physically models the dehazing task with the Atmospheric Scattering Model (ASM), pulling the distribution closer to the clear data and endowing DehazeDDPM with fog-aware ability. The latter stage exploits the strong generation ability of DDPM to compensate for the haze-induced huge information loss, by working in conjunction with the physical modelling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method attains state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and real-world hazy datasets.