Image Dehazing

Although spiking neural networks (SNNs) provide an energy-efficient alternative to artificial neural networks (ANNs), their application to remote sensing image dehazing remains limited. A key challenge arises from the coupling between haze-induced high-frequency attenuation and discrete spike thresholding. This interaction suppresses weak responses and fundamentally limits the recovery of edges, textures, and fine details in spiking dehazing models. To address this challenge, we propose the Efficiently Modulated Spiking Neural Network (EM-SNN), a dedicated spiking framework tailored to remote sensing image dehazing. EM-SNN integrates a statistics-driven Threshold-Modulated Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (TM-LIF) neuron to adaptively compensate for haze-induced contrast compression, together with a Spike Sobel Modulation (SSM) module that enhances structural cues and reduces depth-wise attenuation during spiking feature propagation. By jointly modulating activation scales and structural representations, EM-SNN improves dehazing performance while preserving the inherent event-driven sparsity of SNNs. Experiments on HRSD, RICE, RRSHID, and SateHaze1K demonstrate that EM-SNN achieves competitive dehazing performance while consuming only one quarter of the energy of the strong ANN baseline SFRDP-Net.

Recovering clean 3D scenes from hazy multi-view images is challenging because haze attenuates scene radiance and introduces atmospheric scattering. Recent scattering-aware Gaussian Splatting methods introduce physical haze models into reconstruction, but they often apply degradation in image space or bind medium-related variables to Gaussian primitives, which can entangle clean scene radiance with atmospheric effects. Moreover, low-transmittance regions provide weakened supervision for Gaussian optimization, causing distant or dense-haze areas to be under-reconstructed. We argue that clean reconstruction under haze requires both scene--medium disentanglement and transmittance-aware optimization rebalancing. To this end, we propose Tri-DehazeGS, a scene--medium decoupled Gaussian Splatting framework. It represents the clean scene with Gaussian primitives, models the participating medium using an independent view-shared tri-plane field, and composes hazy observations through a physical scattering model. We further introduce Medium-Decoupled Transmittance Gradient Compensation (MD-TGC), which compensates haze-suppressed gradients after medium freezing without altering forward rendering. Experiments on real and synthetic haze benchmarks show that Tri-DehazeGS improves clean novel-view reconstruction. Code is available at https://github.com/aptx46/Tri-DehazeGS.

The appearance of a smoky scene is shaped by two processes that a camera records together: the participating medium alters scene radiance in a view-dependent way, and the image signal processor (ISP) then remaps the result through a nonlinear tone and color transformation. Recovering a clean 3D scene requires separating both. Per-view sRGB dehazing acts only after the ISP has entangled them; standard 3D reconstruction ignores the medium and absorbs it into scene geometry and radiance. FujinSplat addresses the problem in the RAW domain, where the two processes remain separable. A per-scene Base ISP is fitted from the scene's hazy RAW captures to its own camera renderings and then frozen, providing a fixed photometric anchor that performs no dehazing. Analyzing expert corrections reveals a compact, low-dimensional correction space identifiable from RAW alone. FujinSplat therefore fits per-view action answers at the training poses and trains a single scene-agnostic controller to regress them from RAW; the corrected views supervise one static 3D Gaussian representation, jointly with a bounded per-view residual that reconciles cross-view photometric inconsistencies. On the RealX3D real-world smoke benchmark FujinSplat clearly outperforms the strongest comparable baseline, ahead of both physics-based reconstruction and restoration-then-3DGS pipelines. Code is available at https://github.com/I2WM/FujinSplat.

Two-stage vision pipelines often place an enhancement network before a task network, on the assumption that a cleaner input produces a better output. We evaluate this in a firefighter assistance pipeline, where a dehazer precedes an edge detector that renders smoke-filled rooms as structural outlines. Both were designed for a Raspberry Pi 4, at 355K and 23K parameters, and quantized to UINT8 via TensorFlow Lite. The float dehazer reaches 18.60 dB peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) on held-out real smoke against 13.60 dB unprocessed and 17.08 dB for an AOD-Net trained on the same data, and the edge detector reaches an F-measure at optimal dataset scale (ODS) of 0.738, outperforming an optimized Canny's result of 0.692. Dehazing improves edge extraction under dense smoke but degrades it on clear and lightly hazed frames, where the dehazer discards more detail than the haze obscures. We therefore run the dehazer only when a dark channel haze estimate exceeds a threshold, a 10.1 ms test that lets the pipeline save 469.6 ms on the dehazing stage. Averaged over four haze levels, gating is more accurate than either fixed decision, at 0.675 mean ODS against 0.664 for always dehazing and 0.630 for never dehazing. It reduces the mean per-frame time on the Raspberry Pi from 569 ms to 321 ms, and on clear frames increases the frame rate fivefold, from 1.8 to 9 frames per second.

Existing diffusion-based methods have recently made significant progress in image dehazing. However, they typically neglect the physics of haze formation and reconstruct clean images from pure Gaussian noise, thereby limiting their restoration potential. To address this issue, we propose Haze-Noise Diffusion (HNDiff), a novel diffusion framework that embeds the atmospheric scattering model as an inductive bias. By grounding diffusion in physical principles, HNDiff ensures that the restoration aligns more closely with underlying mechanisms of haze formation. In its forward process, we introduce joint haze-noise diffusion with a haze-aware noise scheduler, which progressively adds both haze and noise to an image. Essentially, the scheduler adapts noise levels according to haze density, meaning that regions with heavier haze receive stronger noise injection to encourage content generation, while clearer regions receive lighter noise to better preserve details, which directly links the forward degradation process with the physics of haze. In the reverse process, we then derive a physically consistent dehazing-denoising process that simultaneously removes haze and noise to restore a clean image in a manner aligned with the forward degradation process. To further enhance practicality, we propose Latent HNDiff, which compiles clean latent priors that can be seamlessly integrated into existing dehazing networks to boost performance. Extensive experiments show that our work significantly improves leading dehazing backbones and achieves state-of-the-art results on benchmark datasets. The project page is available at https://jin-ting-he.github.io/HNDiff .

Dehazing networks are commonly trained on synthetic hazy-clear pairs, but their performance often drops on real photographs. Synthetic haze generated using the atmospheric scattering model does not fully capture the variability of real haze, and paired real hazy-clear images are scarce. In this work, we propose HazeSpikeMamba, a compact dehazing framework that combines a spiking-inspired local path and an attentive state-space global path in a multi-scale U-Net. The local path uses TPCNNSpike, a new spike-emission scheme inspired by the neighborhood coupling of Pulse-Coupled Neural Network (PCNN). Unlike grouped directional scanning, TPCNNSpike updates all neurons in parallel using the previous firing states of their Gaussian-weighted neighborhoods. The global path adapts the Attentive State-Space Module of MambaIRv2, retaining semantic prompting and sequence reordering while removing the window self-attention branch. Its state-space processing models long-range dependencies with complexity linear in sequence length. For target-domain adaptation, a frozen degradation network, pretrained on paired NH-HAZE data, re-synthesizes haze from the dehazed prediction. The reconstruction error updates only the final restoration layers of HazeSpikeMamba without haze-free labels during adaptation. A shared checkpoint is adapted once on each complete unlabeled target set, making the evaluation dataset-level and transductive rather than zero-shot or per-image optimization. The forward network contains 2.02M active parameters and requires 13.27G nominal MACs (measured with thop at 256x256 input). This adaptation consistently improves BRISQUE and NIMA on RTTS, URHI, and HSTS. On RTTS, BRISQUE decreases from 30.13 to 27.72 and NIMA increases from 4.13 to 4.87. Under this transductive protocol, the adapted model also achieves the best BRISQUE and NIMA on URHI and HSTS among the compared methods.

Real-world paired image dehazing remains challenging because haze degradation is spatially non-uniform, illumination-dependent, and physically ambiguous even when haze-free references are available. Existing end-to-end restoration networks usually learn a deterministic mapping from a hazy observation to a clean target, while degradation-sensitive feature responses, reverse haze-formation consistency, and cross-domain negative structure remain insufficiently exploited. In this paper, we propose Backbone-Agnostic Stochastic Perturbation Learning (BSPL), a plug-and-play framework for end-to-end real-world image dehazing. BSPL first introduces a Learnable Stochastic Perturbation Modulator (LSPM), which learns input-conditioned channel-wise and spatial-wise perturbation distributions and converts the resulting feature-response discrepancies into adaptive modulation weights. It then develops a Prior-informed Perturbation-guided Reconstruction Module (PPRM), which reuses the learned bottleneck perturbations together with transmission and atmospheric-light priors to reconstruct the hazy observation from the restored result and enforce degradation consistency. Furthermore, we propose a Dual-space Domain-diversified Distribution-aware Contrastive Loss ($D^3$CL) to regularize both clean restoration and hazy reconstruction spaces with real-world and synthetic negatives. Experiments on five real-world paired benchmarks show that BSPL consistently improves multiple representative backbones with only marginal additional inference overhead.

Single-image dehazing aims to recover clear scenes from haze-degraded images. It remains challenging due to the atmospheric scattering and the complexity of real-world haze distributions. Although recent end-to-end networks have achieved promising performance, two issues still limit their effectiveness: insufficient feature refinement at the bottleneck stage and weak local structural representation in encoder-decoder architectures. Thus, we propose a Haze-Aware Dual-Domain Refinement Network (DDR-Net) for single-image dehazing. Our method is built upon three modules: Haze Prior Extractor (HPE) provides multi-scale haze-aware priors by operating directly on downsampled hazy images; Detail-Enhanced Blocks (DE Blocks) serve as the core feature extraction units, capturing multi-scale structural information and enhancing edge and texture recovery via gradient-aware convolutions; and Spatial-Frequency Bottleneck Refinement (SFBR) at the bottleneck jointly exploits spatial and frequency information to refine bottleneck features. DDR-Net achieves more effective feature representation and reconstruction for haze removal. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms existing dehazing approaches. It achieves competitive performance on synthetic datasets.

Single-image dehazing aims to recover a clear scene from a hazy image and is generally formulated as an image-to-image translation task; however, it faces two limitations. Its performance depends heavily on the haze-formation priors embedded in the model. Prevailing methods adopt the Atmospheric Scattering Model (ASM), whose assumptions of single scattering and homogeneous media are often violated, leading to residual haze and color drift. Moreover, large-scale real hazy/clear pairs are impractical to collect, and existing synthesis approaches fail to reproduce the full complexity of natural haze. To address these issues, we present RTE-FM-Dehazer, a novel dehazing approach, together with a scalable data pipeline. Unlike the ASM, the Radiative Transfer Equation (RTE) jointly accounts for both scattering and absorption, naturally accommodating the non-homogeneous, multiple-scattering media that characterize real hazy scenes. Motivated by the structural similarity between the RTE diffusion-absorption term and the ODE in flow matching, we introduce a diffusion-absorption regularizer derived from a reduced RTE, to steer the flow matching trajectory at each step. Next, leveraging modern vision-language models, we build an automated pipeline and release P-HAZE, a dataset of 50000 realistic hazy/clear pairs. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that RTE-FM-Dehazer, trained solely on P-HAZE, effectively eliminates artifacts like residual haze and color drift, exhibits strong cross-domain generalization, and achieves leading results on five real-world dehazing benchmarks.

Visibility distance is critical to maritime navigational safety because it determines the effective observation range of shipborne and shore-based monitoring systems. Under hazy conditions, degraded visual information shortens observable distance and increases navigational risks and economic losses. Although numerous image dehazing methods have been developed, conventional image quality assessment metrics, such as PSNR, SSIM, FSIM, FADE, and NIQE, cannot establish a physically interpretable relationship between restoration quality and practical visibility thresholds. To address this limitation, this work proposes a visibility-oriented evaluation framework that links dehazing performance with visible-distance estimation. First, a Maritime Simulated Visibility Dataset (MSVD) is constructed using Unity3D to simulate maritime traffic scenes under graded visibility conditions. The dataset provides paired hazy and clear images with precise visibility annotations, enabling quantitative analysis of visibility restoration. Second, a dehazing visibility evaluation metric is developed by using object detection accuracy as an intermediate indicator. By establishing a mapping between visibility distance and detection performance, the proposed metric converts image restoration improvements into measurable visibility gains. Six representative dehazing methods are evaluated using both conventional image quality metrics and the proposed visibility metric. Experimental results under different imaging conditions demonstrate that MSVD provides a reliable benchmark for evaluating dehazing performance across graded visibility levels, while the proposed metric enables interpretable and reliable visible-distance estimation, thereby supporting the assessment of navigational safety and operational efficiency.

A deep defogging pipeline pretrained on controlled laboratory fog and fine-tuned with domain-randomized synthetic fog applied to clear outdoor scenes generalizes across a graded sequence of out-of-distribution settings with no target-domain training, from chamber-free free-flowing fog to iPhone video recorded through an aircraft cabin window in flight, an entirely unseen sensor, scene, and optical path. This directly addresses an open transfer limitation reported for real-world binocular defogging. Two design choices support the transfer. First, a single-camera fog imager photographs a flat-panel display through an artificial-fog enclosure with a fixed 114mm scattering path, producing 5{,}495 pixel-aligned foggy/clear pairs. Exact registration permits a paired Laplacian ratio that predicts per-image restoration quality far better than single-image proxies (Spearman $ρ= 0.632$ versus $0.399$) and supports pixel-exact $L_1$ reconstruction training that avoids adversarial hallucination. Second, the fog-chamber checkpoint is fine-tuned on Mapillary Vistas crops overlaid with on-the-fly randomized synthetic fog spanning a broad range of strengths, spatial variations, airlights, and noise conditions. On a 552-image held-out split, a uniform comparison of 30 restoration backbones places NAFNet at the top (24.33dB~/0.7912SSIM), with a compact alternative within 1.29dB at 3% of the parameter count, and a ResNet-50 classifier confirms that the restoration preserves semantic content rather than only pixel-level structure. On unpaired aircraft-window video, NIQE decreases from a mean of 6.22 to 4.97 after fine-tuning, with temporally stable output across full-motion sequences. The same backbone, under paired supervision, also reaches 20.71dB~/0.683SSIM on a non-overlapping O-HAZE/NH-HAZE split (a transferability check rather than a competitive ranking).

Real-world single image dehazing is highly ill-posed due to spatially and spectrally varying scattering, while practical deployment demands lightweight and low-latency models. Existing approaches either rely on fragile physical inversion under simplified assumptions or adopt heavy blind architectures unsuitable for edge deployment. To overcome these limitations, we propose PGL-Net (Physics-Inspired Global-Local Decoupling Network), a lightweight framework that incorporates physical inductive biases via operator-level emulation, avoiding explicit parameter estimation. It decouples dehazing into global distribution rectification and local structural refinement. A Physics-Inspired Affine Fusion (PAF) module performs globally conditioned alignment across hierarchical skip connections to compensate for haze-induced bias, while a compact Degradation-Aware Modulation (DAM) block adaptively restores spatially and spectrally variant details through dynamic feature modulation. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world benchmarks demonstrate that PGL-Net achieves state-of-the-art restoration quality with significantly reduced complexity. Compared with the recent SOTA SGDN, the Tiny variant (PGL-Net-T) improves PSNR by up to 2.6dB and consistently enhances downstream object detection accuracy, while achieving over a 10x reduction in inference latency. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/sc-30-bit/PGL-Net.

In UAV applications, haze significantly obscures distant details and weaken structural information, hindering the recovery of details. Current UAV scenarios still face two key challenges: (i) paired hazy/clean images from the real world are unobtainable, while the classical atmospheric scattering model is inadequate for modeling the spatially non-uniform haze in UAV imagery; (ii) existing dehazing methods struggle to remove the heavy haze accumulated in the upper regions of UAV images. To address these issues, we first propose a UAV Atmospheric Scattering Model (UASM), which explicitly incorporates flight altitude, viewing pitch, and extinction to characterize the non-uniform haze distribution in UAV imaging. Based on UASM, we develop a physics-driven dehazing framework, termed Geometry-aware Proximal Deep Unfolding Network (GP-DUN). Specifically, GP-DUN consists of three key modules: a Latent Geometry Estimator (LGE) that infers transmittance consistent with UAV imaging geometry, a Geometry-aware Gradient Descent Module (GeoGDM) that embeds UASM into the data-fidelity term and performs physics-consistent closed-form updates, and an Pooling-Expert Proximal Mapping Module (PE-PMM) that learns an implicit prior to restore textures and structures beyond the capability of explicit physical modeling. In addition, we further construct UASM-HazeSet, which provides controllable paired synthetic data together with 2,285 real UAV haze images for testing. Extensive experiments show that GP-DUN consistently outperforms existing methods on both UASM-HazeSet and real UAV haze benchmarks.

Single image dehazing continues to be hindered by the loss of high-frequency details and the difficulty of accurate physical scattering modeling. To address these issues, we propose Fi-Gaussian, a frequency-aware implicit Gaussian splatting network for single image dehazing. Unlike explicit rendering methods that rely on 3D point clouds, our method employs implicit Gaussian splatting to adaptively model the underlying distribution of clear images as a continuous representation in 2D feature space. The core of the network is a frequency-aware implicit Gaussian splatting module, which decouples low-frequency structural information and high-frequency texture information in the frequency domain and then performs adaptive Gaussian aggregation with complex-valued weights to recover fine details. In addition, a physics-driven scattering renormalization mechanism is introduced to estimate the transmission map and atmospheric light under the guidance of implicit Gaussian priors. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that Fi-Gaussian achieves state-of-the-art quantitative performance and produces visually superior dehazed results, validating the effectiveness of implicit Gaussian splatting for low-level vision tasks.

Existing single image dehazing methods are often constrained by computational redundancy in pixel-level optimization and the lack of physical interpretability in implicit neural networks. These limitations hinder the balance between representation efficiency and reconstruction fidelity. To address these issues, we propose Dehaze-GaussianImage, the first zero-shot framework that introduces 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) into the image dehazing domain to break the traditional pixel-grid processing paradigm. Distinct from static convolutional neural networks (CNNs) or Transformers, our approach models hazy images as continuous and dynamically evolvable anisotropic Gaussian fields. Specifically, we propose a novel reconstruction-decoupling zero-shot learning strategy that embeds the atmospheric scattering model into the Gaussian parameter space. This strategy drives Gaussian primitives to adaptively split, clone, and prune during optimization, achieving geometric-level decoupling of the transmission medium and clear textures. Furthermore, explicit structure-preserving constraints are introduced to suppress artifacts commonly caused by traditional physical priors. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in a fully unsupervised manner with minimal parameters, highlighting the potential of explicit Gaussian representation for low-level vision tasks.

The underwater images are captured within diverse water-medium conditions, leading to complex degradation, including color bias, low contrast, and blur effect. Recently, learning-based methods have demonstrated their potential for underwater image enhancement (UIE). However, most of the previous work focus on the training strategy or network design to make the enhanced result aligned well with the labels in datasets, ignoring that the labels are selected from the enhanced results of previous UIE methods and these pseudo-labels are noisy. Consequently, the performance of their models is not satisfactory to a certain extent. However, collecting the true labels of the underwater images is challenging. In this work, we propose a transfer learning-based UIE that does not require underwater images to have paired noisy or true labels for learning. Instead, the UIE task is first divided into global color correction, haze removal, and background noise suppression following the underwater physics. Then multiple types of prior from other vision tasks are leveraged as cross-domain supervision in each step. In this way, a novel UIE is available via transfer learning, and the physics-aligned UIE decomposition provides theoretical soundness. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our proposal based on physics and priors fusion achieves SOTA performance in the UIE task and effectively boosts downstream vision tasks, significantly outperforming benchmark methods. Project repo: https://github.com/Haru2022/P2-UIE.

Currently, there is a gap in the field of ultra-high-definition (UHD) video dehazing due to the lack of a benchmark for evaluation. Furthermore, existing video dehazing methods cannot run on consumer-grade GPUs when processing continuous UHD sequences of 3--5 frames at a time. In this paper, we address both issues with a new benchmark and an efficient method. Our key observation is that atmospheric dehazing reduces to a per-pixel affine transform governed by the low-frequency depth field, which can be compactly encoded in bilateral grids whose prediction cost is decoupled from the output resolution. Building on this, we propose LiBrA-Net, which factorizes the spatiotemporal affine field into a spatial--color and a temporal bilateral sub-grid predicted at a fixed low resolution, fuses their coefficients in the $\mathfrak{gl}(3)$ Lie algebra under group-theoretic regularization, maps the result to invertible GL(3) transforms via a Cayley parameterization, and restores high-frequency detail through a lightweight input-guided branch. We further release UHV-4K, the first paired 4K video dehazing benchmark with depth, transmission, and optical-flow annotations on every frame. Across UHV-4K, REVIDE, and HazeWorld, LiBrA-Net sets a new state of the art among compared video dehazing methods while running native 4K at 25 FPS on a single GPU with only 6.12 M parameters. Code and data are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/LiBrA-Net-42B8.

Existing single image dehazing methods have demonstrated satisfactory performance on homogeneous thin-haze images; however, they often struggle with non-homogeneous hazy images that exhibit spatially varying haze concentrations and abrupt density transitions across different regions. To address this fundamental limitation, we propose a novel multi-branch deep neural network framework, termed Concentration Partitioning and Image Fusion Network (CPIFNet), which decomposes the challenging non-homogeneous dehazing problem into a set of tractable homogeneous sub-problems. Our key insight is that a single non-homogeneous hazy image can be viewed as a composite of multiple local regions, each exhibiting approximately homogeneous haze characteristics. CPIFNet employs a two-stage architecture consisting of an Image Enhancement Network (IENet) stage and an Image Fusion Network (IFNet) stage. In the first stage, multiple IENet branches are independently trained on homogeneous haze datasets of different concentration levels, producing enhancement models that excel at restoring regions matching their respective haze densities. In the second stage, the IFNet intelligently aggregates the advantageous regions from all enhancement outputs through deep feature stacking and merging, yielding a unified high-quality dehazed result. Furthermore, we introduce a comprehensive loss function incorporating reconstruction, perceptual, structural, and color losses to jointly supervise both stages.

Remote sensing images are frequently degraded by adverse weather conditions, particularly clouds and haze, which severely impair downstream applications. Existing restoration methods typically rely on computationally heavy architectures or sequential pipelines (e.g., detail enhancement followed by color rendition) that suffer from mutual interference and artifact accumulation. Furthermore, recent unified grid-based approaches utilize fixed, isotropic interpolation kernels, neglecting the intrinsic low-dimensional manifold of natural images and inevitably causing edge blur. To address these limitations, we propose 6th Grid-Net, a highly efficient and unified remote sensing image restoration framework tailored for resource-constrained edge devices. Specifically, we construct a novel six-dimensional fusion tensor that seamlessly integrates the color rendition capabilities of 3D LUTs with the spatial-luminance detail preservation of bilateral grids. To overcome the drawbacks of standard trilinear interpolation, we introduce a manifold-adaptive high-dimensional sampling mechanism. This mechanism dynamically adjusts the interpolation kernel based on local edge orientation, texture strength, and color similarity, enabling simultaneous global color stylization and local edge refinement in a single forward pass. Additionally, an edge-aware grid smoothing constraint and dynamic quantization are incorporated to suppress ghosting artifacts and significantly compress the model size. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that 6th Grid-Net achieves state-of-the-art restoration quality across various degradation scenarios.

Single image dehazing is often constrained by a trade-off between restoration quality and computational efficiency. While efficient, CNN networks struggle to learn robust priors for dense and non-homogeneous haze. Conversely, diffusion models provide strong generative priors but suffer from severe inference latency and sampling instability. To address these limitations, we propose ZID-Net, a novel framework that explicitly decouples diffusion supervision from feed-forward inference. For efficient inference, we design a frequency-spatial decoupled feed-forward backbone. Within this backbone, a Channel-Spatial Laplacian Mask (CSLM) filters haze-amplified noise to extract purified structural details, while Lightweight Global Context Blocks (LGCBs) establish long-range spatial dependencies to capture the global variations of haze. A Dynamic Feature Arbitration Block (DFAB) then adaptively fuses these semantic and structural features for robust reconstruction. To provide this backbone with physical priors without the inference cost, we introduce a Zero-Inference Prior Propagation Head (ZI-PPH) during training. ZI-PPH leverages a conditional diffusion process to predict residual noise, providing degradation-aware structural supervision to the backbone. By discarding the diffusion branch at test time, ZID-Net integrates diffusion priors into a pure feed-forward architecture for accurate and efficient restoration. ZID-Net achieves 40.75 dB PSNR on the synthetic RESIDE dataset and outperforms existing methods with a 1.13 dB gain on real-world datasets. Additionally, it yields a 3.06 dB PSNR gain on the StateHaze1k remote sensing dataset with an inference time of just 19.35 ms. The project code is available at: https://github.com/XoomitLXH/ZID-Net.

In real-world scenarios, image defogging is an inverse problem due to unknown scene depth, atmospheric scattering, and the common absence of ground truth . To resolve the issue, we propose a hybrid defogging model that integrates a fourth-order nonlinear PDE with a physical haze formation model. We used Dark Channel Prior to estimate atmospheric parameters and to generate a guidance image, while the final restoration is performed via a fourth-order PDE-based evolution. A fourth-order PDE of the type telegraph is then evolved, incorporating an edge-adaptive diffusion coefficient and a fidelity term weighted by the transmission map. Fourth-order diffusion effectively suppresses haze while preserving structural details, and the hyperbolic formulation improves numerical stability and convergence behavior. We use relative error norm criteria for the convergence of our PDE. The proposed method is compared with Dark Channel prior, modified Dark Channel prior, and variational-based single-image defogging techniques. When we have ground truth available, we use MSE and SSIM for quantitative evaluation, whereas no-reference metrics, including FADE, Contrast Restoration Index, Average Gradient, and Entropy, are applied to real-world foggy images. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed hybrid PDE-based method provides comparable visual quality and maintains structural details.

Dehazing is a technique in computer vision for enhancing the visual quality of images captured in cloudy or foggy conditions. Dehazing helps to recover clear, high-quality images from haze-affected remote sensing data. In this study, we introduce IncepDeHazeGAN, a novel Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) involving Inception block and multi-layer feature fusion for the task of single-image dehazing. Utilizing the Inception block allows for multi-scale feature extraction. On the other hand, the multi-layer feature fusion design achieves efficient reuse of features as the features extracted at different convolution layers are fused several times. Grad-CAM XAI technique has been applied to our network, highlighting the regions focused on by the network for dehazing and its adaptation to different haze conditions. Experiments demonstrate that our network achieves state-of-the-art results in several datasets.

Atmospheric haze significantly degrades wildlife imagery, impeding computer vision applications critical for conservation, such as animal detection, tracking, and behavior analysis. To address this challenge, we introduce AnimalHaze3k a synthetic dataset comprising of 3,477 hazy images generated from 1,159 clear wildlife photographs through a physics-based pipeline. Our novel IncepDehazeGan architecture combines inception blocks with residual skip connections in a GAN framework, achieving state-of-the-art performance (SSIM: 0.8914, PSNR: 20.54, and LPIPS: 0.1104), delivering 6.27% higher SSIM and 10.2% better PSNR than competing approaches. When applied to downstream detection tasks, dehazed images improved YOLOv11 detection mAP by 112% and IoU by 67%. These advances can provide ecologists with reliable tools for population monitoring and surveillance in challenging environmental conditions, demonstrating significant potential for enhancing wildlife conservation efforts through robust visual analytics.