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The presence of haze in the atmosphere degrades the quality of images captured by visible camera sensors. The removal of haze, called dehazing, is typically performed under the physical degradation model, which necessitates a solution of an ill-posed inverse problem. To relieve the difficulty of the inverse problem, a novel prior called dark channel prior (DCP) was recently proposed and has received a great deal of attention. The DCP is derived from the characteristic of natural outdoor images that the intensity value of at least one color channel within a local window is close to zero. Based on the DCP, the dehazing is accomplished through four major steps: atmospheric light estimation, transmission map estimation, transmission map refinement, and image reconstruction. This four-step dehazing process makes it possible to provide a step-by-step approach to the complex solution of the ill-posed inverse problem. This also enables us to shed light on the systematic contributions of recent researches related to the DCP for each step of the dehazing process. Our detailed survey and experimental analysis on DCP-based methods will help readers understand the effectiveness of the individual step of the dehazing process and will facilitate development of advanced dehazing algorithms.

Recent research on image denoising has progressed with the development of deep learning architectures, especially convolutional neural networks. However, real-world image denoising is still very challenging because it is not possible to obtain ideal pairs of ground-truth images and real-world noisy images. Owing to the recent release of benchmark datasets, the interest of the image denoising community is now moving toward the real-world denoising problem. In this paper, we propose a grouped residual dense network (GRDN), which is an extended and generalized architecture of the state-of-the-art residual dense network (RDN). The core part of RDN is defined as grouped residual dense block (GRDB) and used as a building module of GRDN. We experimentally show that the image denoising performance can be significantly improved by cascading GRDBs. In addition to the network architecture design, we also develop a new generative adversarial network-based real-world noise modeling method. We demonstrate the superiority of the proposed methods by achieving the highest score in terms of both the peak signal-to-noise ratio and the structural similarity in the NTIRE2019 Real Image Denoising Challenge -Track 2:sRGB.

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This paper reviews the NTIRE 2020 challenge on real image denoising with focus on the newly introduced dataset, the proposed methods and their results. The challenge is a new version of the previous NTIRE 2019 challenge on real image denoising that was based on the SIDD benchmark. This challenge is based on a newly collected validation and testing image datasets, and hence, named SIDD+. This challenge has two tracks for quantitatively evaluating image denoising performance in (1) the Bayer-pattern rawRGB and (2) the standard RGB (sRGB) color spaces. Each track ∼250 registered participants. A total of 22 teams, proposing 24 methods, competed in the final phase of the challenge. The proposed methods by the participating teams represent the current state-of-the-art performance in image denoising targeting real noisy images. The newly collected SIDD+ datasets are publicly available at: https://bit.ly/siddplus_data. A. Abdelhamed (kamel@eecs.yorku.ca, York University), M. Afifi, R. Timofte, and M.S. Brown are the NTIRE 2020 challenge organizers, while the other authors participated in the challenge. Appendix A contains the authors' teams and affiliations. NTIRE webpage: arXiv:2005.04117v1 [cs.CV] 8 May 2020

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