  Image restoration under hazy weather condition, which is called single image
dehazing, has been of significant interest for various computer vision
applications. In recent years, deep learning-based methods have achieved
success. However, existing image dehazing methods typically neglect the
hierarchy of features in the neural network and fail to exploit their
relationships fully. To this end, we propose an effective image dehazing method
named Hierarchical Contrastive Dehazing (HCD), which is based on feature fusion
and contrastive learning strategies. HCD consists of a hierarchical dehazing
network (HDN) and a novel hierarchical contrastive loss (HCL). Specifically,
the core design in the HDN is a hierarchical interaction module, which utilizes
multi-scale activation to revise the feature responses hierarchically. To
cooperate with the training of HDN, we propose HCL which performs contrastive
learning on hierarchically paired exemplars, facilitating haze removal.
Extensive experiments on public datasets, RESIDE, HazeRD, and DENSE-HAZE,
demonstrate that HCD quantitatively outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in
terms of PSNR, SSIM and achieves better visual quality.
