Research on the dehazing effect of orthogonal polarization method based on atmospheric scattering model and considering extinction ratio parameter

Abstract

ABSTRACT The hazy weather is currently one of the most common atmospheric environments. It is an urgent problem to realize clear imaging in hazy environment. Orthogonal polarization dehazing is one of the classical dehazing techniques attracting a widespread attention from research workers. However, while using this method, the extinction ratio (ER) parameter of the polarizer was neglected leading to poor dehazing. Therefore, we have introduced the ER of polarizers into the orthogonal polarization dehazing technique in this paper. In the process of sky region division, this study proposes to use HSV, RGB and Lab colour channels to create a comprehensive mask to select the sky region. And the morphological corrosion operation is utilized to increase the region connectivity for better sky region division. Based on subjective visualization, it can be found that the dehazing effect is significantly enhanced with the introduction of ER. The dehazing effect was evaluated based on four parameters of contrast (C 0), peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index measure (SSIM) and information entropy (E n ). It is further demonstrated the necessity of introducing ER. The experimental results show that the ER can make the dehazing effect of the orthogonal polarization dehazing technique improved, which is valuable for the engineering application of image processing in hazy environment. The experimental results proved to be encouraging.