Dehazing-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields from Hazy Images

TL;DR

Dehazing-NeRF is an unsupervised method that jointly learns atmospheric scattering and NeRF models from hazy images to improve 3D scene reconstruction and view synthesis without relying on dehazing priors.

Contribution

It introduces a novel unsupervised approach that combines atmospheric scattering modeling with NeRF to recover clear 3D scenes from hazy images, surpassing previous methods.

Findings

Outperforms simple dehazing plus NeRF approaches in experiments.

Effectively recovers clear 3D scenes from hazy images.

Maintains geometric consistency during dehazing and view synthesis.

Abstract

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) has received much attention in recent years due to the impressively high quality in 3D scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis. However, image degradation caused by the scattering of atmospheric light and object light by particles in the atmosphere can significantly decrease the reconstruction quality when shooting scenes in hazy conditions. To address this issue, we propose Dehazing-NeRF, a method that can recover clear NeRF from hazy image inputs. Our method simulates the physical imaging process of hazy images using an atmospheric scattering model, and jointly learns the atmospheric scattering model and a clean NeRF model for both image dehazing and novel view synthesis. Different from previous approaches, Dehazing-NeRF is an unsupervised method with only hazy images as the input, and also does not rely on hand-designed dehazing priors. By jointly combining the depth estimated from the NeRF 3D scene with the atmospheric scattering model, our proposed model breaks through the ill-posed problem of single-image dehazing while maintaining geometric consistency. Besides, to alleviate the degradation of image quality caused by information loss, soft margin consistency regularization, as well as atmospheric consistency and contrast discriminative loss, are addressed during the model training process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the simple combination of single-image dehazing and NeRF on both image dehazing and novel view image synthesis.