Foggy image restoration using deep sub‐pixel reconstruction network

Abstract

Abstract Light undergoes attenuation due to scattering and refraction when propagating through aerosols. In foggy conditions, Aerosol particles in the troposphere exhibit high mobility introducing intricate non‐linear noise into images. Foggy image restoration represents an ill‐posed problem, where traditional physical models and image enhancement techniques often prove inadequate in delivering effective solutions. This paper introduces a novel deep sub‐pixel reconstruction algorithm for foggy image restoration, pioneering the application of sub‐pixel reconstruction modules to this domain. This model employs convolutional layers to extract low‐level features and dense‐connected layers for high‐level feature extraction. Furthermore, a specialized sub‐pixel reconstruction module tailored for the task of foggy image restoration is designed, with the purpose of reconstructing dehazed images from latent vectors. During training, a generative adversarial training framework is adopted, incorporating a purpose‐designed discriminator. Additionally, a fusion loss is implemented to facilitate model refinement. Quantitative and qualitative evaluation experiments conducted on synthetic and real‐world image datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in preserving finer details. The Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) is observed to improve by 2.5%, attesting to enhanced perceptual quality for grayscale foggy images.

Keywords

• fog
• image reconstruction
• image restoration