Joint dual-teacher distillation and unsupervised fusion for unpaired real-world image dehazing

Abstract Existing learning-based dehazing algorithms struggle to deal with real world hazy images for lack of paired clean data. Moreover, most dehazing methods require significant computation and memory. To address the above problems, we propose a joint dual-teacher knowledge distillation and unsupervised fusion framework for single image dehazing in this paper. First, considering the complex degradation factors in real-world hazy images, two synthetic-to-real dehazing networks are explored to generate two preliminary dehazing results with the heterogeneous distillation strategy. Second, to get more qualified ground truth, an unsupervised adversarial fusion network is proposed to refine the preliminary outputs of teachers with unpaired clean images. In particular, the unpaired clean images are enhanced to deal with the dim artifacts. Furthermore, to alleviate the structure distortion in the unsupervised adversarial training, we constructed an intermediate image to constrain the output of the fusion network. Finally, considering the memory storage and computation overhead, an end-to-end lightweight student network is trained to learn the mapping from the original hazy image to the output of the fusion network. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on real-world hazy images in terms of no-reference image quality assessment and the parameters.