Weighted Fusion of Pre-processing Techniques for Neural Network-based Image Haze Removal

Abstract

Haze is the natural phenomenon, which affects an image's air light and visibility. It creates a layer that hides the information in an acquired hazy image and decreases its visibility. Hazy scenarios are mostly seen in the transportation sector and remote sensing. It affects the quality of an image captured. Haze is one of the major hurdles in several computer vision applications. This paper observes and analyses different methods of haze removal via image enhancement techniques. Proposes the weighted average of the image enhancement methods to generate the enhanced hazy input image as the initial step. These enhanced images do train the neural network to estimate transmission map as well as atmospheric light, used for haze removal from images. The proposed method is experimented with 135 hazy images from three standard datasets, alias I-Haze, NH-Haze, and O-Haze (45 images from each total 135 hazy images). It gives clearer results than a few similar existing haze removal techniques. Also, the experimental results tested with performance metrics Entropy PSNR, and SSIM have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed haze removal method having weighted fusion of pre-processing techniques.