A new fast and efficient dehazing and defogging algorithm for single remote sensing images

Abstract

Information about the earth’s surface is difficult to capture in remote sensing images because bad weather greatly curtails visibility and diminishes visual contrast in the images. For the purpose of military survey and aerial surveillance, these images are crucial for providing information. It is quintessential to eradicate bad weather conditions like haze and fog from remote sensing images. Recently, numerous deweathering initiatives and endeavors have been undertaken to alleviate these limitations. These contemporary deweathering approaches, however, are inadequate to recover dense haze images. This work presented a novel visibility restoration approach based on segmentation and unsharp mask guided filtering method. It consists of the following steps to restore the scene’s radiance: First, a segmentation method is employed to determine atmospheric light to quantify contrast and color. Estimation of the transmission map utilizing the dark channel prior is then performed to precisely determine the proximity between objects. The resultant output image contains halo artifacts and inconsistencies in the structure. A guided filter method based on unsharp masking is employed to optimize the transmission map in order to solve this issue. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed indicators ensures high uniformity regarding qualitative and quantitative evaluation using six performance metrics: mean square error (MSE), peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index measure (SSIM), universal image quality index (UQI), fog-aware density evaluator (FADE), dehazing algorithm index (DHQI), standard deviation (CC), and blind contrast enhancement assessment (e and r).