Single Maritime Image Defogging Based on Illumination Decomposition Using Texture and Structure Priors

Removing fog components from maritime images is more challenging than removing them from land images because of the complicated scattering effects. In this paper, we propose a single maritime image defogging algorithm based on illumination decomposition. First, we decompose a foggy input image into glow and glow-free layers by formulating an optimization problem and then solving it effectively, where the optimization variables are updated by closed-form solutions. Then, the fog components in the glow-free layer are removed using a defogging algorithm. Finally, the natural illumination in the glow layer is recovered using a compensation scheme to obtain the final fog-free image. Experimental results on real test images demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of both subjective and objective evaluation criteria.