Image dehazing algorithms based on dark channel prior principle have achieved good results for most scenes. However, the popular dark channel prior tends to underestimate transmissions of bright areas or objects, such as the skies, white areas and self-luminous bodies, which may cause color distortions during dehazing. A complementary prior called the extreme reflectance channel prior (ERC), which combines the dark channel prior with the bright channel prior, is proposed to estimate the transmission map. The extreme reflectance channel is the union of dark and bright channel’s pixels which satisfy the corresponding channel. Based on the scattering analysis results that the intensities of pixels in ERC are often close to 0 or 1 for the natural haze-free images or close to global atmospheric light if hazes occur in the air, the pixels in a hazy image can be recovered according to ERC to calculate the transmission map and then solve the haze imaging mode. Experiments show that ERC method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in PSNR, SSIM and visual perception effects.
