Let You See in Sand Dust Weather: A Method Based on Halo-Reduced Dark Channel Prior Dehazing for Sand-Dust Image Enhancement

The images that are captured in sand storms often suffer from low contrast and serious color cast that are caused by sand dust, and these issues will have significant negative effects on the performance of an outdoor computer vision system. To address these problems, a method based on halo-reduced dark channel prior (DCP) dehazing for sand dust image enhancement is proposed in this paper. It includes three components in sequence: color correction in the LAB color space based on gray world theory, dust removal using a halo-reduced DCP dehazing method, and contrast stretching in the LAB color space using a Gamma function improved contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE), in which a guided filter is used to improve the artifacts of the histogram equalization. Experiments on a large number of real sand dust images demonstrate that the proposed method can well remove the overall yellowing tone and dust haze effect and obtain normal visual colors and a detailed clear image.