Enhancing Hazy Wildlife Imagery: AnimalHaze3k and IncepDehazeGan

Abstract

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.