Towards Optimal Aggregation of Varying Range Dependencies in Haze Removal

Haze removal aims to restore a clear image from a hazy input. Existing methods achieve notable success by specializing in either short-range dependencies to preserve local details or long-range dependencies to capture global context. Given the complementary strengths of both, a natural progression is to explicitly integrate them within a unified framework and enable their reasonable aggregation. However, this integration remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose DehazeMatic, which simultaneously and explicitly captures both short- and long-range dependencies through a dual-stream design. To optimize the contribution of dependencies at varying ranges, we conduct extensive experiments to identify key influencing factors and find that an effective aggregation mechanism should be guided by the joint consideration of haze density and semantic information. Building on these insights, we introduce the CLIP-enhanced Dual-path Aggregator, which not only enables the generation of fine-grained haze density maps for the first time, but also produces semantic maps within a shared backbone, ultimately leveraging both to instruct the aggregation process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DehazeMatic outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple benchmarks.