Removing Haze Particles From Single Image via Exponential Inference With Support Vector Data Description

Outdoor images captured during hazy conditions have degraded visibility. The lack of both a medium transmission and atmospheric lights in a single haze image cause an ill-posed problem in the atmospheric scattering model. This paper proposes a novel haze density estimation model with a universal atmospheric-light extractor for single-image dehazing. The proposed method employs exponential inference to construct an exponential inference model to more accurately estimate haze density compared with the state-of-the-art methods. The coefficients in the proposed haze density estimation model are learned using a turbulent particle swarm optimization technique to obtain the best approximation of medium transmission. Moreover, a novel universal atmospheric-light extractor based on support vector data description is utilized to resolve the problem caused by a lack of atmospheric light. The overall results obtained by conducting qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrated that the proposed method has substantially higher dehazing efficacy and produces fewer artifacts than the state-of-the-art haze removal methods.