Abstract
The research on sand-dust image enhancement usually follows the developmental dynamics of image haze removal and is transitioning from traditional methods to end-to-end (e2e) learning-based algorithms. However, the more complex degradation of sandstorm images inevitably increases the potential risks in e2e algorithms, leading to unstable model performance. To bridge this gap, we reanalyze the extractor-reconstructor structure and propose a latent-content guided adversarial sand-dust image reconstruction (LGASR) strategy. Specifically, LGASR alternates the training of the backbone network between the learning line and the guiding line, optimizing the extractor to accurately capture the latent content of input images and enabling the reconstructor to reconstruct target images based on the extracted content. Additionally, we designed a module named Desandformer to enhance the model’s ability to extract and utilize latent features. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world sandstorm images demonstrate the superior performance of LGASR.












Similar content being viewed by others
Data Availability
Data will be made available on request.
References
Si Y, Xu M, Yang F (2024) Hierarchical contrastive learning and color standardization for single image sand-dust removal. Pattern Anal Appl 27(1):5
Gao G, Lai H, Liu Y, Wang L, Jia Z (2021) Sandstorm image enhancement based on yuv space. Optik 226:165659
Wang B, Wei B, Kang Z, Hu L, Li C (2021) Fast color balance and multi-path fusion for sandstorm image enhancement. Signal Image Video Process 15:637–644
Gao G, Lai H, Wang L, Jia Z (2022) Color balance and sand-dust image enhancement in lab space. Multimed Tools Appl 81(11):15349–15365
Gao G, Lai H, Jia Z, Liu Y, Wang Y (2020) Sand-dust image restoration based on reversing the blue channel prior. IEEE Photonics J 12(2):1–16
Yu S, Zhu H, Wang J, Fu Z, Xue S, Shi H (2016) Single sand-dust image restoration using information loss constraint. J Mod Opt 63(21):2121–2130
Lee H (2022) Sandstorm image enhancement using image-adaptive eigenvalue and brightness-adaptive dark channel network. Symmetry 14(11):2310
Shi F, Jia Z, Lai H, Kasabov NK, Song S, Wang J (2023) Sand-dust image enhancement based on light attenuation and transmission compensation. Multimed Tools Appl 82(5):7055–7077
Gao, Y., Xu, W., Lu, Y.(2023): Let you see in haze and sandstorm: Two-in-one low-visibility enhancement network. IEEE Transact Instrum Meas
Ding B, Chen H, Xu L, Zhang R (2022) Restoration of single sand-dust image based on style transformation and unsupervised adversarial learning. IEEE Access 10:90092–90100
Dosovitskiy A, Beyer L, Kolesnikov A, Weissenborn D, Zhai X, Unterthiner T, Dehghani M, Minderer M, Heigold G, Gelly S, et al.(2021): An image is worth 16x16 words: transformers for image recognition at scale. In: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Learning Representations
Khan S, Naseer M, Hayat M, Zamir SW, Khan FS, Shah M (2022) Transformers in vision: a survey. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) 54(10s):1–41
Zhai X, Kolesnikov A, Houlsby N, Beyer L(2022): Scaling vision transformers. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp 12104–12113
Gatys LA, Ecker AS, Bethge M(2016): Image style transfer using convolutional neural networks. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp 2414–2423
Kingma DP, Welling M.(2014): Auto-encoding variational bayes. In: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Learning Representations.
Fu X, Zhuang P, Huang Y, Liao Y, Zhang X-P, Ding X. : A retinex-based enhancing approach for single underwater image. In: 2014 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), pp 4572–4576 (2014). IEEE
Xu G, Wang X, Xu X (2020) Single image enhancement in sandstorm weather via tensor least square. IEEE/CAA J Autom Sin 7(6):1649–1661
Al-Ameen Z (2016) Visibility enhancement for images captured in dusty weather via tuned tri-threshold fuzzy intensification operators. Int J Intell Syst Appl 8(8):10
Shi Z, Feng Y, Zhao M, Zhang E, He L (2020) Normalised gamma transformation-based contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalisation with colour correction for sand-dust image enhancement. IET Image Process 14(4):747–756
Hua Z, Qi L, Guan M, Su H, Sun Y (2022) Colour balance and contrast stretching for sand-dust image enhancement. IET Image Process 16(14):3768–3780
Kanti Dhara S, Roy M, Sen D, Kumar Biswas P (2021) Color cast dependent image dehazing via adaptive airlight refinement and non-linear color balancing. IEEE Transact Circuits Syst Video Technol 31(5):2076–2081
Peng Y-T, Cao K, Cosman PC (2018) Generalization of the dark channel prior for single image restoration. IEEE Transact Image Process 27(6):2856–2868
Shi Z, Feng Y, Zhao M, Zhang E, He L (2019) Let you see in sand dust weather: A method based on halo-reduced dark channel prior dehazing for sand-dust image enhancement. IEEE Access 7:116722–116733
He K, Sun J, Tang X (2011) Single image haze removal using dark channel prior. IEEE Transact Pattern Anal Mach Intell 33(12):2341–2353
He K, Sun J, Tang X (2012) Guided image filtering. IEEE Transact Pattern Anal Mach Intell 35(6):1397–1409
Liu Y, Yan Z, Tan J, Li Y (2023) Multi-purpose oriented single nighttime image haze removal based on unified variational retinex model. IEEE Transact Circuits Syst Video Technol 33(4):1643–1657
Zhang W, Zhuang P, Sun H-H, Li G, Kwong S, Li C (2022) Underwater image enhancement via minimal color loss and locally adaptive contrast enhancement. IEEE Transact Image Process 31:3997–4010
Zhou X, Huang H, He R, Wang Z, Hu J, Tan T(2023): Msra-sr: Image super-resolution transformer with multi-scale shared representation acquisition. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision, pp 12665–12676
Si Y, Yang F, Liu Z (2022) Sand dust image visibility enhancement algorithm via fusion strategy. Sci Rep 12(1):13226
Gao G, Lai H, Jia Z et al (2023) Two-step unsupervised approach for sand-dust image enhancement. Int J Intell Syst 2023:4506331
Liang P, Ding W, Fan L, Wang H, Li Z, Yang F, Wang B, Li C (2022) Multi-scale and multi-patch transformer for sandstorm image enhancement. J Vis Commun Image Represent 89:103662
Shi J, Wei B, Zhou G, Zhang L(2023): Sandformer: Cnn and transformer under gated fusion for sand dust image restoration. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, pp 1–5 . IEEE
Shi W, Caballero J, Huszár F, Totz J, Aitken AP, Bishop R, Rueckert D, Wang Z(2016): Real-time single image and video super-resolution using an efficient sub-pixel convolutional neural network. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp 1874–1883
Song Y, He Z, Qian H, Du X (2023) Vision transformers for single image dehazing. IEEE Transact Image Process 32:1927–1941
Zamir SW, Arora A, Khan S, Hayat M, Khan FS, Yang M-H(2022): Restormer: efficient transformer for high-resolution image restoration. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp 5728–5739
Qin X, Wang Z, Bai Y, Xie X, Jia H(2020): Ffa-net: feature fusion attention network for single image dehazing. In: Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 11908–11915
Goodfellow I, Pouget-Abadie J, Mirza M, Xu B, Warde-Farley D, Ozair S, Courville A, Bengio Y (2020) Generative adversarial networks. Commun ACM 63(11):139–144
Ganin Y, Lempitsky V(2015): Unsupervised domain adaptation by backpropagation. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 1180–1189
Si Y, Yang F, Guo Y, Zhang W, Yang Y (2022) A comprehensive benchmark analysis for sand dust image reconstruction. J Vis Commun Image Represent 89:103638
Moorthy A, Bovik A (2009) A modular framework for constructing blind universal quality indices. IEEE Signal Process Lett 17:7
Liu L, Liu B, Huang H, Bovik AC (2014) No-reference image quality assessment based on spatial and spectral entropies. Signal Process: Image Commun 29(8):856–863
Liu J, Liu W, Sun J, Zeng T(2021): Rank-one prior: toward real-time scene recovery. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 14802–14810
Liu J, Liu RW, Sun J, Zeng T (2023) Rank-one prior: real-time scene recovery. IEEE Transact Pattern Anal Mach Intell 45(7):8845–8860
Zheng L, Li Y, Zhang K, Luo W (2023) T-net: deep stacked scale-iteration network for image dehazing. IEEE Trans Multimedia 25:6794–6807. https://doi.org/10.1109/TMM.2022.3214780
Wang C-Y, Bochkovskiy A, Liao H-YM (2023): Yolov7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp 7464–7475
Li B, Ren W, Fu D, Tao D, Feng D, Zeng W, Wang Z (2018) Benchmarking single-image dehazing and beyond. IEEE Transact Image Process 28(1):492–505
Liao Y, Su Z, Liang X, Qiu B (2018): Hdp-net: Haze density prediction network for nighttime dehazing. In: Proceedings of the Pacific Rim Conference on Multimedia, pp 469–480
Li C, Guo C, Ren W, Cong R, Hou J, Kwong S, Tao D (2019) An underwater image enhancement benchmark dataset and beyond. IEEE Transact Image Process 29:4376–4389
Acknowledgements
This work is supported by National Key Research and Development Project of China (2019YFB1312102) and Natural Science Foundation of Hebei Province (F2019202364).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
Yazhong Si: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Methodology, Validation, Project administration, Writing—original draft, Writing—review & editing. Chen Li: Visualization, Software, Data curation, Writing—review & editing. Fan Yang: Supervision, Resources, Visualization, Writing—review & editing. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Confict of interest
The authors declared that they have no conflict of interest to this work.
Informed consent
This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Si, Y., Li, C. & Yang, F. LGASR: latent-content guided adversarial sand-dust image reconstruction strategy. J Supercomput 81, 168 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-024-06638-0
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-024-06638-0