A new haze image database with detailed air quality information and a novel no-reference image quality assessment method for haze images

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new standard haze image database with nearly all kinds of haze situations. Our database includes haze-free images as well as different levels and situations of haze images, such as snowy and extremely serious haze images. Our database also records the related weather and air quality information. Moreover, the database offers a mean opinion score (MOS) for each image as the subjective evaluation of the haze severity. Our database provides ample haze images with various objective and subjective descriptions, and has significantly potential scientific value. Since haze is a reason leading to the degradation of the image quality, obtaining the quality of haze images is also necessary and meaningful. In this paper, a novel no-reference image quality assessment (IQA) method for haze images is also proposed. Our method analyzes the model of haze images to evaluate the quality. The experimental results on the haze database show that our method is consistent with the subjective evaluation.