Single image fog removal based on local extrema

Atmospheric conditions induced by suspended particles, such as fog and haze, severely alter the scene appearance. In this paper, we propose a novel defogging method based on the local extrema, aiming at improving the image visibility under foggy or hazy weather condition. The proposed method utilizes atmospheric scattering model to realize the fog removal. It applies the local extrema method to figure out three pyramid levels to estimate atmospheric veil, and manipulates the tone and contrast of details at different scales through multi-scale tone manipulation algorithm. The results on the experiments of comparison with traditional methods demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve more accurate restoration for the color and details, resulting in a great improvement in image visibility.