Remote Sensing Image Dehazing via Dual-View Knowledge Transfer

Remote-sensing image dehazing (RSID) is crucial for applications such as military surveillance and disaster assessment. However, current methods often rely on complex network architectures, compromising computational efficiency and scalability. Furthermore, the scarcity of annotated remote-sensing-dehazing datasets hinders model development. To address these issues, a Dual-View Knowledge Transfer (DVKT) framework is proposed to generate a lightweight and efficient student network by distilling knowledge from a pre-trained teacher network on natural image dehazing datasets. The DVKT framework includes two novel knowledge-transfer modules: Intra-layer Transfer (Intra-KT) and Inter-layer Knowledge Transfer (Inter-KT) modules. Specifically, the Intra-KT module is designed to correct the learning bias of the student network by distilling and transferring knowledge from a well-trained teacher network. The Inter-KT module is devised to distill and transfer knowledge about cross-layer correlations. This enables the student network to learn hierarchical and cross-layer dehazing knowledge from the teacher network, thereby extracting compact and effective features. Evaluation results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed DVKT framework achieves superior performance for RSID. In particular, the distilled model achieves a significant speedup with less than 6% of the parameters and computational cost of the original model, while maintaining a state-of-the-art dehazing performance.