Deep Learning-Enabled Variational Optimization Method for Image Dehazing in Maritime Intelligent Transportation Systems

Image dehazing has become a fundamental problem of common concern in computer vision-driven maritime intelligent transportation systems (ITS). The purpose of image dehazing is to reconstruct the latent haze-free image from its observed hazy version. It is well known that the accurate estimation of transmission map plays a vital role in image dehazing. In this work, the coarse transmission map is firstly estimated using a robust fusion-based strategy. A unified optimization framework is then proposed to estimate the refined transmission map and latent sharp image simultaneously. The resulting constrained minimization model is solved using a two-step optimization algorithm. To further enhance dehazing performance, the solutions of subproblems obtained in this optimization algorithm are equivalent to deep learning-based image denoising. Due to the powerful representation ability, the proposed method can accurately and robustly estimate the transmission map and latent sharp image. Numerous experiments on both synthetic and realistic datasets have been performed to compare our method with several state-of-the-art dehazing methods. Dehazing results have demonstrated the proposed method’s superior imaging performance in terms of both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. The enhanced imaging quality is beneficial for practical applications in maritime ITS, for example, vessel detection, recognition, and tracking.