Overwater Image Dehazing via Cycle-Consistent Generative Adversarial Network

In contrast to images taken on land scenes, images taken over water are more prone to degradation due to the influence of the haze. However, existing image dehazing methods are mainly developed for land-scene images and perform poorly when applied to overwater images. To address this problem, we collect the first overwater image dehazing dataset and propose a Generative Adversial Network (GAN)-based method called OverWater Image Dehazing GAN (OWI-DehazeGAN). Due to the difficulties of collecting paired hazy and clean images, the dataset contains unpaired hazy and clean images taken over water. The proposed OWI-DehazeGAN is composed of an encoder–decoder framework, supervised by a forward-backward translation consistency loss for self-supervision and a perceptual loss for content preservation. In addition to qualitative evaluation, we design an image quality assessment neural network to rank the dehazed images. Experimental results on both real and synthetic test data demonstrate that the proposed method performs superiorly against several state-of-the-art land dehazing methods. Compared with the state-of-the-art, our method gains a significant improvement by 1.94% for SSIM, 7.13% for PSNR and 4.00% for CIEDE2000 on the synthetic test dataset.