Scene-Awareness Based Single Image Dehazing Technique via Automatic Estimation of Sky Area

Abstract

The occurrence of fog, mist, smog, or haze significantly reduces the visibility of the scenes and images, resulting in limited recognition of computer vision and computer graphics. So, removing haze from images is a must. In this paper, we regard image dehazing as a mathematical inversion process and image restoration based on atmospheric scattering models. The atmospheric light can be accurately estimated by combining the gray threshold segmentation and the skyline method. The improved least squares filtering method is used to optimize the transmittance map so that the edge details can be highlighted and the halo effect can be alleviated. A large number of test images show that our algorithm can achieve better experimental results than the other seven most advanced dehazing strategies.

Keywords

• Grey-level threshold segmentation
• skyline
• least-square filter
• halo artifact
• dehazing