# HazeMatching: Dehazing Light Microscopy Images with Guided Conditional Flow Matching

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22397 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22397/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Inverse problems and image restoration, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 26 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jun 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Inverse problems and image restoration](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/inverse-problems-and-image-restoration/)

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

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Very Deep Residual Channel Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02758/) (2018)
- [ESRGAN: Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00219/) (2018)
- [Multi-Stage Progressive Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02808/) (2021)
- [The Perception-Distortion Tradeoff](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06077/) (2017)
- [Noise2Void - Learning Denoising from Single Noisy Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10980/) (2018)
- [Rethinking Coarse-to-Fine Approach in Single Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05054/) (2021)
- [Ladder Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.02282/) (2016)
- [Cold Diffusion: Inverting Arbitrary Image Transforms Without Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09392/) (2022)
- [Gradient Magnitude Similarity Deviation: A Highly Efficient Perceptual Image Quality Index](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3052/) (2013)
- [Inversion by Direct Iteration: An Alternative to Denoising Diffusion for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11435/) (2023)
- [Stochastic interpolants with data-dependent couplings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03725/) (2023)
- [Minimizing Trajectory Curvature of ODE-based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12003/) (2023)
- [Probabilistic Noise2Void: Unsupervised Content-Aware Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00651/) (2019)
- [Posterior-Mean Rectified Flow: Towards Minimum MSE Photo-Realistic Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00418/) (2024)
- [Interpretable Unsupervised Diversity Denoising and Artefact Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01374/) (2021)
- [MicroSSIM: Improved Structural Similarity for Comparing Microscopy Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08747/) (2024)
- [μSplit: efficient image decomposition for microscopy data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12872/) (2022)

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

- [ResMatching: Noise-Resilient Computational Super-Resolution via Guided Conditional Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26601/) (2025)
- [SWITi: Quantifying and Reducing Tiling Artifacts with Sliding Window Inner Tiling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18990/) (2026)
- [FlowSem: Flow Matching for Adaptive Wireless Image Transmission in Semantic Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.21651/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Fluorescence microscopy is a major driver of scientific progress in the life sciences. Although high-end confocal microscopes are capable of filtering out-of-focus light, cheaper and more accessible microscopy modalities, such as widefield microscopy, can not, which consequently leads to hazy image data. Computational dehazing is trying to combine the best of both worlds, leading to cheap microscopy but crisp-looking images. The perception-distortion trade-off tells us that we can optimize either for data fidelity, e.g. low MSE or high PSNR, or for data realism, measured by perceptual metrics such as LPIPS or FID. Existing methods either prioritize fidelity at the expense of realism, or produce perceptually convincing results that lack quantitative accuracy. In this work, we propose HazeMatching, a novel iterative method for dehazing light microscopy images, which effectively balances these objectives. Our goal was to find a balanced trade-off between the fidelity of the dehazing results and the realism of individual predictions (samples). We achieve this by adapting the conditional flow matching framework by guiding the generative process with a hazy observation in the conditional velocity field. We evaluate HazeMatching on 5 datasets, covering both synthetic and real data, assessing both distortion and perceptual quality. Our method is compared against 12 baselines, achieving a consistent balance between fidelity and realism on average. Additionally, with calibration analysis, we show that HazeMatching produces well-calibrated predictions. Note that our method does not need an explicit degradation operator to exist, making it easily applicable on real microscopy data. All data used for training and evaluation and our code will be publicly available under a permissive license.