A multi-stage feature fusion defogging network based on the attention mechanism

The presence of haze results in diminished image clarity, the loss of image details, color alterations, and a decline in image visibility. This paper proposes an efficient multi-stage feature fusion defogging network based on the attention mechanism for effective defogging in complex environments. To create a multi-branch defogging network, the model integrates several attention techniques to create various sorts of branching network architectures. The image’s spatial details and contextual information are supplemented and merged based on the recovered image feature information of different network branches to increase the effectiveness of the network model. The stage attention fusion mechanism created among several network branches can lessen the loss of image data during feature extraction and improve the effectiveness of the image-defogging operation. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has superior defogging performance in both synthetic and real-world scene datasets and performs more admirably in terms of accuracy compared to other sophisticated algorithms, particularly in the RESIDE and O-Haze datasets. The PSNR metrics on the RESIDE and O-Haze datasets are improved by 1.58 dB and 1.61 dB, respectively, compared to the best-advanced technique suggested in this study, and the SSIM metrics on the O-Haze dataset are improved by 3.4%.