Single image haze removal using light and dark channel prior

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a simple but effective method to remove haze from a single input image. This method is not only prior on dark channel, but also light. Based on dark channel prior (DCP), a new haze removal scheme is proposed by Dr. He in [6] and it is becoming popular because of its dark channel statistics of outdoor haze-free images. Whereas, there are two problems in the scheme proposed in [6]: the cost of computing the transmission map using soft mapping is high and the atmospheric light is over-exposure when a bright area is shown in images. This paper proposes a novel dehazing algorithm with dark channel and light channel where the light channel is a kind of statistics of outdoor hazy images. Moreover, the guided filter is introduced to refine the dark channel and the light channel in this paper. The objective of proposed dehazing algorithm (PDA) is to alleviate or remove these problems found in [6]. To verify the PDA and compare it with the DCP scheme, several examples are given in this paper. The results show that the PDA is about 25 times faster than the DCP since the soft matting is avoided on average, and visual quality in the PDA without over-exposure problem is better than that in the DCP. With these improvements, the proposed method may be applied in video surveillance, intelligent transportation system and remote sensing.