MABDT: Multi-scale attention boosted deformable transformer for remote sensing image dehazing

Abstract

Owing to the heterogeneous spatial distribution and non-uniform morphological characteristics of haze in remote sensing images (RSIs), conventional dehazing algorithms struggle to precisely recover the fine-grained details of terrestrial objects. To address this issue, a novel multi-scale attention boosted deformable Transformer (MABDT) tailored for RSI dehazing is proposed. This framework synergizes the multi-receptive field features elicited by convolutional neural network (CNN) with the long-term dependency features derived from Transformer, which facilitates a more adept restitution of texture and intricate detail information within RSIs. Firstly, spatial attention deformable convolution is introduced for computation of multi-head self-attention in the Transformer block, particularly in addressing complex haze scenarios encountered in RSIs. Subsequently, a multi-scale attention feature enhancement (MAFE) block is designed, tailored to capture local and multi-level detailed information features using multi-receptive field convolution operations, thereby accommodating non-uniform haze. Finally, a multi-level feature complementary fusion (MFCF) block is proposed, leveraging both shallow and deep features acquired from all encoding layers to augment each level of reconstructed image. The dehazing performance is evaluated on 6 open-source datasets, and quantitative and qualitative experimental results demonstrate the advancements of the proposed method in both metrical scores and visual quality. The source code is available at https://github.com/ningjin00/MABDT.