# WaveletFormerNet: A Transformer-based Wavelet Network for Real-world Non-homogeneous and Dense Fog Removal

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.04550 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04550/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Benchmarking Single Image Dehazing and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04143/) (2017)
- [Bag of Tricks for Image Classification with Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01187/) (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)
- [Multi-Scale Boosted Dehazing Network with Dense Feature Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13388/) (2020)
- [GridDehazeNet: Attention-Based Multi-Scale Network for Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03245/) (2019)
- [Contrastive Learning for Compact Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09367/) (2021)
- [Multi-level Wavelet-CNN for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07071/) (2018)
- [Gated Fusion Network for Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00213/) (2018)
- [Dense Haze: A benchmark for image dehazing with dense-haze and haze-free images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02904/) (2019)
- [O-HAZE: a dehazing benchmark with real hazy and haze-free outdoor images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05101/) (2018)
- [Gated Context Aggregation Network for Image Dehazing and Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08747/) (2018)
- [Curricular Contrastive Regularization for Physics-aware Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14218/) (2023)
- [U-Net Transformer: Self and Cross Attention for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06104/) (2021)
- [FD-GAN: Generative Adversarial Networks with Fusion-discriminator for Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06968/) (2020)
- [I-HAZE: a dehazing benchmark with real hazy and haze-free indoor images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05091/) (2018)
- [DW-GAN: A Discrete Wavelet Transform GAN for NonHomogeneous Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08911/) (2021)
- [NTIRE 2020 Challenge on NonHomogeneous Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03457/) (2020)
- [SDWNet: A Straight Dilated Network with Wavelet Transformation for Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05803/) (2021)
- [Fast Deep Multi-patch Hierarchical Network for Nonhomogeneous Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05999/) (2020)
- [Y-net: Multi-scale feature aggregation network with wavelet structure similarity loss function for single image dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13912/) (2020)
- [Dual-Scale Single Image Dehazing Via Neural Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05913/) (2022)

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

- [Dehazing Remote Sensing and UAV Imagery: A Review of Deep Learning, Prior-based, and Hybrid Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07520/) (2024)
- [DRACO-DehazeNet: An Efficient Image Dehazing Network Combining Detail Recovery and a Novel Contrastive Learning Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14595/) (2024)
- [Diffusion-Assisted Frequency Attention Model for Whole-body Low-field MRI Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17764/) (2025)
- [Exploring Compositionality in Vision Transformers using Wavelet Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24438/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Although deep convolutional neural networks have achieved remarkable success in removing synthetic fog, it is essential to be able to process images taken in complex foggy conditions, such as dense or non-homogeneous fog, in the real world. However, the haze distribution in the real world is complex, and downsampling can lead to color distortion or loss of detail in the output results as the resolution of a feature map or image resolution decreases. In addition to the challenges of obtaining sufficient training data, overfitting can also arise in deep learning techniques for foggy image processing, which can limit the generalization abilities of the model, posing challenges for its practical applications in real-world scenarios. Considering these issues, this paper proposes a Transformer-based wavelet network (WaveletFormerNet) for real-world foggy image recovery. We embed the discrete wavelet transform into the Vision Transformer by proposing the WaveletFormer and IWaveletFormer blocks, aiming to alleviate texture detail loss and color distortion in the image due to downsampling. We introduce parallel convolution in the Transformer block, which allows for the capture of multi-frequency information in a lightweight mechanism. Additionally, we have implemented a feature aggregation module (FAM) to maintain image resolution and enhance the feature extraction capacity of our model, further contributing to its impressive performance in real-world foggy image recovery tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our WaveletFormerNet performs better than state-of-the-art methods, as shown through quantitative and qualitative evaluations of minor model complexity. Additionally, our satisfactory results on real-world dust removal and application tests showcase the superior generalization ability and improved performance of WaveletFormerNet in computer vision-related applications.