GenHaze: Pioneering Controllable One-Step Realistic Haze Generation for Real-World Dehazing

Real-world image dehazing is crucial for enhancing visual quality in computer vision applications. However, existing physics-based haze generation paradigms struggle to model the complexities of real-world haze and lack controllability, limiting the performance of existing baselines on real-world images. In this paper, we introduce GenHaze, a pioneering haze generation framework that enables the one-step generation of high-quality, reference-controllable hazy images. GenHaze leverages the pre-trained latent diffusion model (LDM) with a carefully designed clean-to-haze generation protocol to produce realistic hazy images. Additionally, by leveraging its fast, controllable generation of paired high-quality hazy images, we illustrate that existing dehazing baselines can be unleashed in a simple and efficient manner. Extensive experiments indicate that GenHaze achieves visually convincing and quantitatively superior hazy images. It also {significantly improves} multiple existing dehazing models across 7 non-reference metrics with minimal fine-tuning epochs.Our work demonstrates that LDM possesses the potential to generate realistic degradations, providing an effective alternative to prior generation pipelines.