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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Rai, Shivarth, Pokuri, Tejeswar
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.16284
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author Rai, Shivarth
Pokuri, Tejeswar
author_facet Rai, Shivarth
Pokuri, Tejeswar
contents Atmospheric haze significantly degrades wildlife imagery, impeding computer vision applications critical for conservation, such as animal detection, tracking, and behavior analysis. To address this challenge, we introduce AnimalHaze3k a synthetic dataset comprising of 3,477 hazy images generated from 1,159 clear wildlife photographs through a physics-based pipeline. Our novel IncepDehazeGan architecture combines inception blocks with residual skip connections in a GAN framework, achieving state-of-the-art performance (SSIM: 0.8914, PSNR: 20.54, and LPIPS: 0.1104), delivering 6.27% higher SSIM and 10.2% better PSNR than competing approaches. When applied to downstream detection tasks, dehazed images improved YOLOv11 detection mAP by 112% and IoU by 67%. These advances can provide ecologists with reliable tools for population monitoring and surveillance in challenging environmental conditions, demonstrating significant potential for enhancing wildlife conservation efforts through robust visual analytics.
format Preprint
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institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Enhancing Hazy Wildlife Imagery: AnimalHaze3k and IncepDehazeGan
Rai, Shivarth
Pokuri, Tejeswar
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Atmospheric haze significantly degrades wildlife imagery, impeding computer vision applications critical for conservation, such as animal detection, tracking, and behavior analysis. To address this challenge, we introduce AnimalHaze3k a synthetic dataset comprising of 3,477 hazy images generated from 1,159 clear wildlife photographs through a physics-based pipeline. Our novel IncepDehazeGan architecture combines inception blocks with residual skip connections in a GAN framework, achieving state-of-the-art performance (SSIM: 0.8914, PSNR: 20.54, and LPIPS: 0.1104), delivering 6.27% higher SSIM and 10.2% better PSNR than competing approaches. When applied to downstream detection tasks, dehazed images improved YOLOv11 detection mAP by 112% and IoU by 67%. These advances can provide ecologists with reliable tools for population monitoring and surveillance in challenging environmental conditions, demonstrating significant potential for enhancing wildlife conservation efforts through robust visual analytics.
title Enhancing Hazy Wildlife Imagery: AnimalHaze3k and IncepDehazeGan
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.16284