Dehazing of outdoor images using notch based integral guided filter

Abstract

The dehazing problem is an ill-posed and can be regularized by designing an efficient filter to refine the coarse estimated atmospheric veil. The most of existing dehazing techniques suffer from over-saturation, halo artifacts, and gradient reversal artifacts problems. In this paper, a dehazing technique is proposed to remove halo and gradient reversal artifacts problem. In this technique, a notch based integral guided filter is proposed. Moreover, the visibility restoration model is also modified to reduce over-saturation problem. The proposed dehazing technique is compared with seven well-known existing dehazing techniques over ten benchmark hazy images. The experimental results demonstrate that proposed technique is able to remove the haze from hazy images as well as significantly improve the image’s visibility. It also reveals that the restored image has little or no artifacts.