  In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm to directly restore a clear
image from a hazy input. The proposed algorithm hinges on an end-to-end
trainable neural network that consists of an encoder and a decoder. The encoder
is exploited to capture the context of the derived input images, while the
decoder is employed to estimate the contribution of each input to the final
dehazed result using the learned representations attributed to the encoder. The
constructed network adopts a novel fusion-based strategy which derives three
inputs from an original hazy image by applying White Balance (WB), Contrast
Enhancing (CE), and Gamma Correction (GC). We compute pixel-wise confidence
maps based on the appearance differences between these different inputs to
blend the information of the derived inputs and preserve the regions with
pleasant visibility. The final dehazed image is yielded by gating the important
features of the derived inputs. To train the network, we introduce a
multi-scale approach such that the halo artifacts can be avoided. Extensive
experimental results on both synthetic and real-world images demonstrate that
the proposed algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art
algorithms.
