Enhanced densely dehazing network for single image haze removal under railway scenes

Purpose – This paper aims to propose an enhanced densely dehazing network to suit railway scenes’ features and improve the visual quality degraded by haze and fog. Design/methodology/approach – It is an end-to-end network based on DenseNet. The authors design enhanced dense blocks and fuse them in a pyramid pooling module for visual data’s local and global features. Multiple ablation studies have been conducted to show the effects of each module proposed in this paper. Findings – The authors have compared dehazed results on real hazy images and railway hazy images of state-of-the-art dehazing networks with the dehazed results in data quality. Finally, an object-detection test is taken to judge the edge information preservation after haze removal. All results demonstrate that the proposed dehazing network performs better under railway scenes in detail. Originality/value – This study provides a new method for image enhancing in the railway monitoring system.