  Single image dehazing is a challenging ill-posed restoration problem. Various
prior-based and learning-based methods have been proposed. Most of them follow
a classic atmospheric scattering model which is an elegant simplified physical
model based on the assumption of single-scattering and homogeneous atmospheric
medium. The formulation of haze in realistic environment is more complicated.
In this paper, we propose to take its essential mechanism as "black box", and
focus on learning an input-adaptive trainable end-to-end dehazing model. An
U-Net like encoder-decoder deep network via progressive feature fusions has
been proposed to directly learn highly nonlinear transformation function from
observed hazy image to haze-free ground-truth. The proposed network is
evaluated on two public image dehazing benchmarks. The experiments demonstrate
that it can achieve superior performance when compared with popular
state-of-the-art methods. With efficient GPU memory usage, it can
satisfactorily recover ultra high definition hazed image up to 4K resolution,
which is unaffordable by many deep learning based dehazing algorithms.
