VROHI: Visibility Recovery for Outdoor Hazy Image in Scattering Media

Abstract

Additive haze model (AHM), due to its high simplicity, has a potential to increase the efficiency of the restoration procedure of images degraded by scattering media. However, AHM is designed for hazy remote sensing data and is not suitable to be used on outdoor images. In this paper, according to the low-frequency feature (LFC) of haze, AHM is modified via gamma correction technique to make it suitable for modeling outdoor images. Benefitting from the modified AHM (MAHM), a simple yet effective method called VROHI is proposed to enhance the visibility of an outdoor hazy image. In specific, a low complexity LFC extraction method is designed by utilizing characteristic of the discrete cosine transform. Subsequently, by constructing the linear function of unknown parameters and imposing the saturation prior on MAHM, the image dehazing problem can be derived into a global optimization function. Experiments reveal that the proposed VROHI is superior to the other state-of-the-art techniques in terms of both the processing efficiency and recovery quality.

Keywords

• Additive haze model
• global optimization dehazing
• haze thickness map
• low-frequency component
• propagation and scattering