  Single-image haze removal is a long-standing hurdle for computer vision
applications. Several works have been focused on transferring advances from
image classification, detection, and segmentation to the niche of image
dehazing, primarily focusing on contrastive learning and knowledge
distillation. However, these approaches prove computationally expensive,
raising concern regarding their applicability to on-the-edge use-cases. This
work introduces a simple, lightweight, and efficient framework for single-image
haze removal, exploiting rich "dark-knowledge" information from a lightweight
pre-trained super-resolution model via the notion of heterogeneous knowledge
distillation. We designed a feature affinity module to maximize the flow of
rich feature semantics from the super-resolution teacher to the student
dehazing network. In order to evaluate the efficacy of our proposed framework,
its performance as a plug-and-play setup to a baseline model is examined. Our
experiments are carried out on the RESIDE-Standard dataset to demonstrate the
robustness of our framework to the synthetic and real-world domains. The
extensive qualitative and quantitative results provided establish the
effectiveness of the framework, achieving gains of upto 15\% (PSNR) while
reducing the model size by $\sim$20 times.
