# FALCON: Frequency Adjoint Link with CONtinuous Density Mask for Fast Single Image Dehazing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.00972 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00972/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [UNet++: A Nested U-Net Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10165/) (2018)
- [Multi-Scale Context Aggregation by Dilated Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07122/) (2015)
- [Generative Image Inpainting with Contextual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07892/) (2018)
- [Benchmarking Single Image Dehazing and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04143/) (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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [NH-HAZE: An Image Dehazing Benchmark with Non-Homogeneous Hazy and Haze-Free Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03560/) (2020)
- [Dense Haze: A benchmark for image dehazing with dense-haze and haze-free images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02904/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Image Inpainting via Generative Multi-column Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.08771/) (2018)
- [Intriguing Findings of Frequency Selection for Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11745/) (2021)
- [Cycle-Dehaze: Enhanced CycleGAN for Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.05308/) (2018)
- [DW-GAN: A Discrete Wavelet Transform GAN for NonHomogeneous Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08911/) (2021)
- [Perceiving and Modeling Density is All You Need for Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09733/) (2021)
- [Progressive Feature Fusion Network for Realistic Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02283/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Fourier Decomposition for Explicit Representation of 3D Point Cloud Attributes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10055/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Image dehazing, addressing atmospheric interference like fog and haze, remains a pervasive challenge crucial for robust vision applications such as surveillance and remote sensing under adverse visibility. While various methodologies have evolved from early works predicting transmission matrix and atmospheric light features to deep learning and dehazing networks, they innately prioritize dehazing quality metrics, neglecting the need for real-time applicability in time-sensitive domains like autonomous driving. This work introduces FALCON (Frequency Adjoint Link with CONtinuous density mask), a single-image dehazing system achieving state-of-the-art performance on both quality and speed. Particularly, we develop a novel bottleneck module, namely, Frequency Adjoint Link, operating in the frequency space to globally expand the receptive field with minimal growth in network size. Further, we leverage the underlying haze distribution based on the atmospheric scattering model via a Continuous Density Mask (CDM) which serves as a continuous-valued mask input prior and a differentiable auxiliary loss. Comprehensive experiments involving multiple state-of-the-art methods and ablation analysis demonstrate FALCON's exceptional performance in both dehazing quality and speed (i.e., >180 frames-per-second), quantified by metrics such as FPS, PSNR, and SSIM.