Single Image Haze Removal With Haze Map Optimization for Various Haze Concentrations

Abstract

Hazy images suffer from poor visibility and possess low-contrast, degrading the visibility of the scene. The performance of single-image haze removal methods is limited by priors or constraints. This article presents an efficient single image dehazing method by cascading two models. The first model is a new atmospheric scattering model from which atmospheric light and transmission map are estimated and the second model is the proposed sparse haze model from which a haze map is estimated. A least-square optimization is carried out on the haze map to restore the haze-free image. Moreover, the analysis of the haze removal process has been investigated by a membership function to observe how much haze has been removed from the input hazy images containing various degrees of haze. Dehazing performances are evaluated on three types of datasets, i.e., real-world hazy images, synthetic images of various degrees of haze, and our developed dataset containing thick haze. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach generates better performance than the state-of-the-art methods, especially in the sky or objects containing white objects, both qualitatively and quantitatively.