# WaveDH: Wavelet Sub-bands Guided ConvNet for Efficient Image Dehazing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.01604 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01604/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [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)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [Real-Time Single Image and Video Super-Resolution Using an Efficient Sub-Pixel Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05158/) (2016)
- [ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11164/) (2018)
- [EfficientNetV2: Smaller Models and Faster Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00298/) (2021)
- [Benchmarking Single Image Dehazing and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04143/) (2017)
- [GhostNet: More Features from Cheap Operations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11907/) (2019)
- [Semantic Foggy Scene Understanding with Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07819/) (2017)
- [Making Convolutional Networks Shift-Invariant Again](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11486/) (2019)
- [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)
- [MAXIM: Multi-Axis MLP for Image Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02973/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Lightweight Image Super-Resolution with Information Multi-distillation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11856/) (2019)
- [Contrastive Learning for Compact Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09367/) (2021)
- [A guide to convolution arithmetic for deep learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.07285/) (2016)
- [Multi-level Wavelet-CNN for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07071/) (2018)
- [Photorealistic Style Transfer via Wavelet Transforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.09760/) (2019)
- [StyleSwin: Transformer-based GAN for High-resolution Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10762/) (2021)
- [Densely Connected Pyramid Dehazing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08396/) (2018)
- [Gated Fusion Network for Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00213/) (2018)
- [Residual Feature Distillation Network for Lightweight Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11551/) (2020)
- [Fast and Accurate Single Image Super-Resolution via Information Distillation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09454/) (2018)
- [Gated Context Aggregation Network for Image Dehazing and Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08747/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [VAPO: Efficient and Reliable Reinforcement Learning for Advanced Reasoning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05118/) (2025)
- [Mamba-Diffusion Model with Learnable Wavelet for Controllable Symbolic Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03314/) (2025)
- [WD-FQDet: Multispectral Detection Transformer via Wavelet Decomposition and Frequency-aware Query Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13621/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The surge in interest regarding image dehazing has led to notable advancements in deep learning-based single image dehazing approaches, exhibiting impressive performance in recent studies. Despite these strides, many existing methods fall short in meeting the efficiency demands of practical applications. In this paper, we introduce WaveDH, a novel and compact ConvNet designed to address this efficiency gap in image dehazing. Our WaveDH leverages wavelet sub-bands for guided up-and-downsampling and frequency-aware feature refinement. The key idea lies in utilizing wavelet decomposition to extract low-and-high frequency components from feature levels, allowing for faster processing while upholding high-quality reconstruction. The downsampling block employs a novel squeeze-and-attention scheme to optimize the feature downsampling process in a structurally compact manner through wavelet domain learning, preserving discriminative features while discarding noise components. In our upsampling block, we introduce a dual-upsample and fusion mechanism to enhance high-frequency component awareness, aiding in the reconstruction of high-frequency details. Departing from conventional dehazing methods that treat low-and-high frequency components equally, our feature refinement block strategically processes features with a frequency-aware approach. By employing a coarse-to-fine methodology, it not only refines the details at frequency levels but also significantly optimizes computational costs. The refinement is performed in a maximum 8x downsampled feature space, striking a favorable efficiency-vs-accuracy trade-off. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method, WaveDH, outperforms many state-of-the-art methods on several image dehazing benchmarks with significantly reduced computational costs. Our code is available at https://github.com/AwesomeHwang/WaveDH.