Learning mean progressive scattering using binomial truncated loss for image dehazing

In this study, the authors propose a novel progressive dehazing network to address the single image haze removal problem based on a new mean progressive scattering model. Different from methods that learn atmosphere light and transmission maps with different networks, these two variables are optimised in a unified network. Following the methodology of traditional prior-based methods that estimate a coarse transmission map first, a progressive refinement branch in the decoder has been designed to restore the fine-scale transmission map. To improve the prediction accuracy of the transmission map, a novel binomial truncated loss that assigns weights to error values according to the probabilities of error occurrences has been proposed. An ablation study is conducted to verify the effectiveness of the components in the proposed method. Experiments in the synthetic datasets and real images demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.