# Prior-guided Hierarchical Harmonization Network for Efficient Image Dehazing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01136 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01136/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [Pre-Trained Image Processing Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00364/) (2020)
- [Benchmarking Single Image Dehazing and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04143/) (2017)
- [Rethinking Coarse-to-Fine Approach in Single Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05054/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Orthogonal Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12207/) (2019)
- [HorNet: Efficient High-Order Spatial Interactions with Recursive Gated Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14284/) (2022)
- [O-HAZE: a dehazing benchmark with real hazy and haze-free outdoor images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05101/) (2018)
- [DEA-Net: Single image dehazing based on detail-enhanced convolution and content-guided attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04805/) (2023)
- [Iterative Filter Adaptive Network for Single Image Defocus Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13610/) (2021)
- [MogaNet: Multi-order Gated Aggregation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03295/) (2022)
- [Neural Degradation Representation Learning for All-In-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12848/) (2023)
- [SDWNet: A Straight Dilated Network with Wavelet Transformation for Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05803/) (2021)
- [Mutual Information-driven Triple Interaction Network for Efficient Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06998/) (2023)
- [Mutual-Guided Dynamic Network for Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12538/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [UDPNet: Unleashing Depth-based Priors for Robust Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06909/) (2026)
- [Efficient Dual-domain Image Dehazing with Haze Prior Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11035/) (2025)
- [Fourier-RWKV: A Multi-State Perception Network for Efficient Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08161/) (2025)
- [Learning Adaptive Dynamical Features via Multi-τ Liquid-Mamba for All-in-one Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22801/) (2026)
- [Causal-AgentIR: Self-Evolving Causal Memory for Adaptive Image Restoration Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21125/) (2026)
- [Learning Unpaired Image Dehazing with Physics-based Rehazy Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12824/) (2025)
- [Learning to Restore Multi-Degraded Images via Ingredient Decoupling and Task-Aware Path Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04920/) (2025)
- [Physically Interpretable Multi-Degradation Image Restoration via Deep Unfolding and Explainable Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10166/) (2025)
- [From Physical Degradation Models to Task-Aware All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10192/) (2026)
- [QuReC: All-in-One Image Restoration with Query-Specific Guidance and Local-Global Response Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15097/) (2026)
- [Learning to Restore More: Continual Capability Expansion for Pretrained Image Restoration Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30305/) (2026)
- [GraLoD: Graphics-Inspired Continuous Level-of-Detail Learning for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16578/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Image dehazing is a crucial task that involves the enhancement of degraded images to recover their sharpness and textures. While vision Transformers have exhibited impressive results in diverse dehazing tasks, their quadratic complexity and lack of dehazing priors pose significant drawbacks for real-world applications. In this paper, guided by triple priors, Bright Channel Prior (BCP), Dark Channel Prior (DCP), and Histogram Equalization (HE), we propose a textitPrior-textitguided Hierarchical textitHarmonization Network (PGH2Net) for image dehazing. PGH2Net is built upon the UNet-like architecture with an efficient encoder and decoder, consisting of two module types: (1) Prior aggregation module that injects B/DCP and selects diverse contexts with gating attention. (2) Feature harmonization modules that subtract low-frequency components from spatial and channel aspects and learn more informative feature distributions to equalize the feature maps.