BidNet: Binocular Image Dehazing Without Explicit Disparity Estimation

Heavy haze results in severe image degradation and thus hampers the performance of visual perception, object detection, etc. On the assumption that dehazed binocular images are superior to the hazy ones for stereo vision tasks such as 3D object detection and according to the fact that image haze is a function of depth, this paper proposes a Binocular image dehazing Network (BidNet) aiming at dehazing both the left and right images of binocular images within the deep learning framework. Existing binocular dehazing methods rely on simultaneously dehazing and estimating disparity, whereas BidNet does not need to explicitly perform time-consuming and well-known challenging disparity estimation. Note that a small error in disparity gives rise to a large variation in depth and in estimation of haze-free image. The relationship and correlation between binocular images are explored and encoded by the proposed Stereo Transformation Module (STM). Jointly dehazing binocular image pairs is mutually beneficial, which is better than only dehazing left images. We extend the Foggy Cityscapes dataset to a Stereo Foggy Cityscapes dataset with binocular foggy image pairs. Experimental results demonstrate that BidNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art dehazing methods in both subjective and objective assessments.