Multi-Scale Single Image Dehazing Using Laplacian and Gaussian Pyramids

Model-based single image dehazing was widely studied due to its extensive applications.
Ambiguity between object radiance and haze
and
noise amplification in sky regions
are two inherent problems of model-based single image dehazing. In this paper, a dark direct attenuation prior (DDAP) is proposed to address the former problem. A novel haze line averaging is proposed to reduce the morphological artifacts caused by the DDAP which enables a weighted guided image filter with a smaller radius to further reduce the morphological artifacts while preserve the fine structure in the image. A multi-scale dehazing algorithm is then proposed to address the latter problem by adopting Laplacian and Gaussian pyramids to decompose the hazy image into different levels and applying different haze removal and noise reduction approaches to restore the scene radiance at the different levels. The resultant pyramid is collapsed to restore a haze-free image. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art dehazing algorithms.