Image Dehazing with Contextualized Attentive U-NET

Haze, which occurs due to the accumulation of fine dust or smoke particles in the atmosphere, degrades outdoor imaging, resulting in reduced attractiveness of outdoor photography and the effectiveness of vision-based systems. In this paper, we present an end-to-end convolutional neural network for image dehazing. Our proposed U-Net based architecture employs Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) blocks at the skip connections to enforce channel-wise attention and parallelized dilated convolution blocks at the bottleneck to capture both local and global context, resulting in a richer representation of the image features. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in achieving state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark SOTS dataset.