Haze is a natural distortion to the real-life images due to the specific weather conditions. This distortion limits the perceptual fidelity, as well as information integrity, of a given image. Image dehazing for the observed images is a complicated task because of its ill-posed nature. This study offers the Deep-Dehaze network to retrieve haze-free images. Given an input, the proposed architecture uses four feature extraction modules to perform nonlinear feature extraction. We improvise the traditional U-Net architecture and the residual network to design our architecture. We also introduce the $l_1$ spatial-edge loss function that enables our system to achieve better performance than that for the typical $l_1$ and $l_2$ loss function. Unlike other learning-based approaches, our network does not use any fusion connection for image dehazing. By training the image translation and dehazing network in an end-to-end manner, we can obtain better effects of both image translation and dehazing. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world images demonstrate that our model performs favorably against the state-of-the-art dehazing algorithms. We trained our network in an end-to-end manner and validated it on natural and synthetic hazy datasets. Our method shows favorable results on these datasets without any post-processing in contrast to the traditional approach.

Image denoising is still a challenging issue in many computer vision subdomains. Recent studies have shown that significant improvements are possible in a supervised setting. However, a few challenges, such as spatial fidelity and cartoon-like smoothing, remain unresolved or decisively overlooked. Our study proposes a simple yet efficient architecture for the denoising problem that addresses the aforementioned issues. The proposed architecture revisits the concept of modular concatenation instead of long and deeper cascaded connections, to recover a cleaner approximation of the given image. We find that different modules can capture versatile representations, and a concatenated representation creates a richer subspace for low-level image restoration. The proposed architecture’s number of parameters remains smaller than in most of the previous networks and still achieves significant improvements over the current state-of-the-art networks.

The tone-mapping algorithm compresses the high dynamic range (HDR) information into the standard dynamic range for regular devices. An ideal tone-mapping algorithm reproduces the HDR image without losing any vital information. The usual tone-mapping algorithms mostly deal with detail layer enhancement and gradient-domain manipulation with the help of a smoothing operator. However, these approaches often have to face challenges with over enhancement, halo effects, and over-saturation effects. To address these challenges, we propose a two-step solution to perform a tone-mapping operation using contrast enhancement. Our method improves the performance of the camera response model by utilizing the improved adaptive parameter selection and weight matrix extraction. Experiments show that our method performs reasonably well for overexposed and underexposed HDR images without producing any ringing or halo effects.

Class activation map (CAM) helps to formulate saliency maps that aid in interpreting the deep neural network’s prediction. Gradient-based methods are generally faster than other branches of vision interpretability and independent of human guidance. The performance of CAM-like studies depends on the governing model’s layer response and the influences of the gradients. Typical gradient-oriented CAM studies rely on weighted aggregation for saliency map estimation by projecting the gradient maps into single-weight values, which may lead to an over-generalized saliency map. To address this issue, we use a global guidance map to rectify the weighted aggregation operation during saliency estimation, where resultant interpretations are comparatively cleaner and instance-specific. We obtain the global guidance map by performing elementwise multiplication between the feature maps and their corresponding gradient maps. To validate our study, we compare the proposed study with nine different saliency visualizers. In addition, we use seven commonly used evaluation metrics for quantitative comparison. The proposed scheme achieves significant improvement over the test images from the ImageNet, MS-COCO 14, and PASCAL VOC 2012 datasets.