Learning a Convolutional Autoencoder for Nighttime Image Dehazing

Abstract

Currently, haze removal of images captured at night for foggy scenes rely on the traditional, prior-based methods, but these methods are frequently ineffective at dealing with night hazy images. In addition, the light sources at night are complicated and there is a problem of inconsistent brightness. This makes the estimation of the transmission map complicated in the night scene. Based on the above analysis, we propose an autoencoder method to solve the problem of overestimation or underestimation of transmission captured by the traditional, prior-based methods. For nighttime hazy images, we first remove the color effect of the haze image with an edge-preserving maximum reflectance prior (MRP) method. Then, the hazy image without color influence is input into the self-encoder network with skip connections to obtain the transmission map. Moreover, instead of using the local maximum method, we estimate the ambient illumination through a guiding image filtering. In order to highlight the effectiveness of our experiments, a large number of comparison experiments were conducted between our method and the state-of-the-art methods. The results show that our method can effectively suppress the halo effect and reduce the effectiveness of glow. In the experimental part, we calculate that the average Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) is 21.0968 and the average Structural Similarity (SSIM) is 0.6802.