Multi-Branch Gated Fusion Network: A Method That Provides Higher-Quality Images for the USV Perception System in Maritime Hazy Condition

Image data acquired by unmanned surface vehicle (USV) perception systems in hazy situations is characterized by low resolution and low contrast, which can seriously affect subsequent high-level vision tasks. To obtain high-definition images under maritime hazy conditions, an end-to-end multi-branch gated fusion network (MGFNet) is proposed. Firstly, residual channel attention, residual pixel attention, and residual spatial attention modules are applied in different branch networks. These attention modules are used to focus on high-frequency image details, thick haze area information, and contrast enhancement, respectively. In addition, the gated fusion subnetworks are proposed to output the importance weight map corresponding to each branch, and the feature maps of three different branches are linearly fused with the importance weight map to help obtain the haze-free image. Then, the network structure is evaluated based on the comparison with pertinent state-of-the-art methods using artificial and actual datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed network is superior to other previous state-of-the-art methods in the PSNR and SSIM and has a better visual effect in qualitative image comparison. Finally, the network is further applied to the hazy sea–skyline detection task, and advanced results are still achieved.