RTE-FM-Dehazer: Radiative Transfer Equation Inspired Flow Matching for Real-World Image Dehazing

Single-image dehazing aims to recover a clear scene from a hazy image and is generally formulated as an image-to-image translation task; however, it faces two limitations. Its performance depends heavily on the haze-formation priors embedded in the model. Prevailing methods adopt the Atmospheric Scattering Model (ASM), whose assumptions of single scattering and homogeneous media are often violated, leading to residual haze and color drift. Moreover, large-scale real hazy/clear pairs are impractical to collect, and existing synthesis approaches fail to reproduce the full complexity of natural haze. To address these issues, we present RTE-FM-Dehazer, a novel dehazing approach, together with a scalable data pipeline. Unlike the ASM, the Radiative Transfer Equation (RTE) jointly accounts for both scattering and absorption, naturally accommodating the non-homogeneous, multiple-scattering media that characterize real hazy scenes. Motivated by the structural similarity between the RTE diffusion-absorption term and the ODE in flow matching, we introduce a diffusion-absorption regularizer derived from a reduced RTE, to steer the flow matching trajectory at each step. Next, leveraging modern vision-language models, we build an automated pipeline and release P-HAZE, a dataset of 50000 realistic hazy/clear pairs. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that RTE-FM-Dehazer, trained solely on P-HAZE, effectively eliminates artifacts like residual haze and color drift, exhibits strong cross-domain generalization, and achieves leading results on five real-world dehazing benchmarks.

LiDARDustX: A LiDAR Dataset for Dusty Unstructured Road Environments

Autonomous driving datasets are essential for validating the progress of intelligent vehicle algorithms, which include localization, perception, and prediction. However, existing datasets are predominantly focused on structured urban environments, which limits the exploration of unstructured and specialized scenarios, particularly those characterized by significant dust levels. This paper introduces the LiDARDustX dataset, which is specifically designed for perception tasks under high-dust conditions, such as those encountered in mining areas. The LiDARDustX dataset consists of 30,000 LiDAR frames captured by six different LiDAR sensors, each accompanied by 3D bounding box annotations and point cloud semantic segmentation. Notably, over 80% of the dataset comprises dust-affected scenes. By utilizing this dataset, we have established a benchmark for evaluating the performance of state-of-the-art 3D detection and segmentation algorithms. Additionally, we have analyzed the impact of dust on perception accuracy and delved into the causes of these effects. The data and further information can be accessed at: https://github.com/vincentweikey/LiDARDustX.