Feature Attention Cycle Generative Adversarial Network: A Multi-Scene Image Dehazing Method Based on Feature Attention

For the clearing of hazy images, it is difficult to obtain dehazing datasets with paired mapping images. Currently, most algorithms are trained on synthetic datasets with insufficient complexity, which leads to model overfitting. At the same time, the physical characteristics of fog in the real world are ignored in most current algorithms; that is, the degree of fog is related to the depth of field and scattering coefficient. Moreover, most current dehazing algorithms only consider the image dehazing of land scenes and ignore maritime scenes. To address these problems, we propose a multi-scene image dehazing algorithm based on an improved cycle generative adversarial network (CycleGAN). The generator structure is improved based on the CycleGAN model, and a feature fusion attention module is proposed. This module obtains relevant contextual information by extracting different levels of features. The obtained feature information is fused using the idea of residual connections. An attention mechanism is introduced in this module to retain more feature information by assigning different weights. During the training process, the atmospheric scattering model is established to guide the learning of the neural network using its prior information. The experimental results show that, compared with the baseline model, the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) increases by 32.10%, the structural similarity index (SSIM) increases by 31.07%, the information entropy (IE) increases by 4.79%, and the NIQE index is reduced by 20.1% in quantitative comparison. Meanwhile, it demonstrates better visual effects than other advanced algorithms in qualitative comparisons on synthetic datasets and real datasets.