Effective Meta-Attention Dehazing Networks for Vision-Based Outdoor Industrial Systems

Abstract

Haze seriously affects the reliability of industrial systems, especially vision-based outdoor industrial systems such as autopilot systems. A majority of existing dehazing methods are not specifically designed for industrial systems and do not consider the reliability and resource cost of industrial system implementation. In this article, a novel meta-attention dehazing network (MADN) is proposed for direct restoration of clear images from hazy images without using the physical scattering model. Combined with parallel operation and enhancement modules, the meta-network automatically selects the most suitable dehazing network structure based on the current input hazy image by a meta-attention module. In addition, a novel feature loss calculated by the meta-network is proposed, which can accelerate the convergence of the dehazing network to meet the application requirements of practical industrial systems. A large number of experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets show that the proposed MADN satisfies the needs of industrial systems.