CANDY: Conditional Adversarial Networks based End-to-End System for Single Image Haze Removal

Single image haze removal is a challenging and ill-posed problem. The existing haze removal methods in literature, including the recently introduced deep learning methods, model the problem of haze removal as that of estimating intermediate parameters, viz., scene transmission map and atmospheric light. These are used to compute the haze-free image from the hazy input image. Such an approach only focuses on accurate estimation of intermediate parameters, while the aesthetic quality of the haze-free image is unaccounted for in the optimization framework. Thus, errors in the estimation of intermediate parameters often lead to generation of inferior quality haze-free images. In this paper, we present CANDY (Conditional Adversarial Networks based Dehazing of hazY images), a fully end-to-end model which directly generates a clean haze-free image from a hazy input image. CANDY also incorporates the visual quality of haze-free image into the optimization function; thus, generating a superior quality haze-free image. This is one of the first works in literature to propose a fully end-to-end model for single image haze removal. Also, this is the first work to explore the concept of generative adversarial networks for the problem of single image haze removal. CANDY was trained on a synthetically created haze image dataset, while evaluation was performed on challenging synthetic as well as real haze image datasets. The extensive evaluation and comparison results of CANDY reveal that it significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art haze removal methods in literature, both quantitatively as well as qualitatively.