SDBAD-Net: A Spatial Dual-Branch Attention Dehazing Network Based on Meta-Former Paradigm

Image dehazing is an emblematical low-level vision task that aims at restoring haze-free images from haze images. Recently, some methods adopts deep learning techniques to rebuild haze-free images. However, in real-world scenarios, complex degradation of captured images and non-uniform spatial distributions of haze will significantly weaken the generalization ability of these models. Accordingly, we propose a novel Spatial Dual-Branch Attention Dehazing network (SDBAD-Net) based on the Meta-Former paradigm for end-to-end dehazing. Specifically, we firstly design a robust Spatial Dual-Branch Attention (SDBA) module to filter the haze distribution features from different densities, which is suitable for both uniform and non-uniform situations. Secondly, we introduce a Structural Features Supplementary (SFS) module to dynamically fuse the contextual structural features in a nonlinear manner, so as to correct the image distortion caused by the lack of structural details. Finally, the quantitative and qualitative experiments are carried out on two challenging datasets, and the results show that our method outperforms most of state-of-the-art algorithms with fewer parameters and faster speed, especially surpassing FFA-Net with only 50% parameters and 7% computational costs. In addition, we ulteriorly explore its performance on object detection in foggy weather with our model on the challenging Real-world Task-driven Testing Set (RTTS), and the surprising results further prove the robustness and wide-applicability of our method.