Fast Fusion-Based Dehazing With Histogram Modification and Improved Atmospheric Illumination Prior

Haze can seriously affect the visible and visual quality of outdoor optical sensor systems, e.g., driving assistance, remote sensing, and video surveillance. Single image dehazing is an intractable problem due to its ill-posed nature. The main idea of the paper is combining multi-scale fusion strategy and prior knowledge, thereby presenting balanced image contrast enhancement and intrinsic color preservation, efficiently. The atmospheric illumination prior (AIP) has been proved that haze mainly degrades the contrast of the luminance channel rather than chrominance channels in YCrCb colorspace. To this end, we firstly identify and remove the color veil (unbalanced color channel) with the white balance algorithm, to reduce the influence of unbalanced color channels neglected by the AIP. Considering the new observation that hazy regions exhibit low contrast with high-intensity pixels, the dense and mild haze are enhanced by a set of histogram modification techniques, respectively. Then, with the derived inputs, multi-scale fusion based on Laplacian decomposition strategy is proposed to blend visual contrast only in the luminance channel. Without relying on complex enhancement algorithms and only dealing with one channel, the proposed method is attractive for real-time applications. Moreover, The proposed method can be directly applied to the video sequences frame by frame, alleviating visual artifacts. The simulation results show that our method is comparative to and even better than the more complex state-of-the-art techniques.