# FriendNet: Detection-Friendly Dehazing Network

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.04443 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04443/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [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)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02696/) (2022)
- [Simple Baselines for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04676/) (2022)
- [Object Detection with Deep Learning: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05511/) (2018)
- [Benchmarking Single Image Dehazing and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04143/) (2017)
- [Semantic Foggy Scene Understanding with Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07819/) (2017)
- [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)
- [YOLOv6: A Single-Stage Object Detection Framework for Industrial Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02976/) (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)
- [Image-Adaptive YOLO for Object Detection in Adverse Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08088/) (2021)
- [Curricular Contrastive Regularization for Physics-aware Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14218/) (2023)
- [Task-Driven Super Resolution: Object Detection in Low-resolution Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11316/) (2018)
- [Connecting Image Denoising and High-Level Vision Tasks via Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01826/) (2018)
- [Domain Adaptive YOLO for One-Stage Cross-Domain Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13939/) (2021)
- [Dual Directed Capsule Network for Very Low Resolution Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10027/) (2019)
- [Rethinking Performance Gains in Image Dehazing Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11448/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [From Filters to VLMs: Benchmarking Defogging Methods through Object Detection and Segmentation Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03906/) (2025)
- [From Fog to Failure: The Unintended Consequences of Dehazing on Object Detection in Clear Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02027/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Adverse weather conditions often impair the quality of captured images, inevitably inducing cutting-edge object detection models for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving. In this paper, we raise an intriguing question: can the combination of image restoration and object detection enhance detection performance in adverse weather conditions? To answer it, we propose an effective architecture that bridges image dehazing and object detection together via guidance information and task-driven learning to achieve detection-friendly dehazing, termed FriendNet. FriendNet aims to deliver both high-quality perception and high detection capacity. Different from existing efforts that intuitively treat image dehazing as pre-processing, FriendNet establishes a positive correlation between these two tasks. Clean features generated by the dehazing network potentially contribute to improvements in object detection performance. Conversely, object detection crucially guides the learning process of the image dehazing network under the task-driven learning scheme. We shed light on how downstream tasks can guide upstream dehazing processes, considering both network architecture and learning objectives. We design Guidance Fusion Block (GFB) and Guidance Attention Block (GAB) to facilitate the integration of detection information into the network. Furthermore, the incorporation of the detection task loss aids in refining the optimization process. Additionally, we introduce a new Physics-aware Feature Enhancement Block (PFEB), which integrates physics-based priors to enhance the feature extraction and representation capabilities. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art methods on both image quality and detection precision. Our source code is available at https://github.com/fanyihua0309/FriendNet.