Distilling Image Dehazing with Heterogeneous Task Imitation

State-of-the-art deep dehazing models are often difficult in training. Knowledge distillation paves a way to train a student network assisted by a teacher network. However, most knowledge distill methods are used for image classification and segmentation as well as object detection, and few investigate distilling image restoration and use different task for knowledge transfer. In this paper, we propose a knowledge-distill dehazing network which distills image dehazing with the heterogeneous task imitation. In our network, the teacher is an off-the-shelf auto-encoder network and is used for image reconstruction. The dehazing network is trained assisted by the teacher network with the process-oriented learning mechanism. The student network imitates the task of image reconstruction in the teacher network. Moreover, we design a spatial-weighted channel-attention residual block for the student image dehazing network to adaptively learn the content-aware channel level attention and pay more attention to the features for dense hazy regions reconstruction. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we compare our method with several state-of-the-art methods on two synthetic and real-world datasets, as well as real hazy images.