A Naturalness Preserved Fast Dehazing Algorithm Using HSV Color Space

Visibility of outdoor scenes is often degraded by haze. The atmosphere particles absorb and scatter the light, causing failure in various computer vision applications. In this paper, we propose a naturalness preserved fast dehazing algorithm using hue, saturation, and value (HSV) color space. First, we process hazy images in HSV color space instead of red, green, and blue (RBG) in order to preserve hue and reduce computational complexity. Second, we use the modified morphological opening operation for estimating the transmission map. In this way, the halo effects are greatly suppressed, and it costs less time than the specially designed filters. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can effectively remove haze. Also, our algorithm maintains naturalness by preserving hue and suppressing halo effects. Moreover, the computational complexity has been largely reduced, thus making our algorithm appropriate for real-time applications.