DCA-CycleGAN: Unsupervised single image dehazing using Dark Channel Attention optimized CycleGAN

Single image dehazing has great significance in computer vision. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised Dark Channel Attention optimized CycleGAN (DCA-CycleGAN) to deal with the challenging scene with uneven and dense haze concentration. Firstly, the DCA-CycleGAN adopts the dark channel as input and then generate attention through a DCA subnetwork to handle the nonhomogeneous haze. Secondly, in addition to the conventional global discriminator, we also leverage two local discriminators to enhance the dehazing performance on the local dense haze, and a new local adversarial loss calculated strategy is been proposed. Specifically, the dehazing generator consists of two subnetworks: an auto-encoder and a dark channel attention subnetwork. The auto-encoder consists of an encoder, a feature transformation module, and a decoder. The dark channel attention subnetwork has the same structure as the encoder and the feature transformation module to ensure the same receptive field, which utilizes the dark channel to generate attention map and fine-tune the auto-encoder. Experimental results against several state-of-the-art methods demonstrate that our method can generate better visual effects, and is effective.