Simulation of Hazy Image and Validation of Haze Removal Technique

Abstract

Haze hampers the performance of vision systems. So, removal of haze appearance in a scene should be the first-priority for clear vision. It finds wide spectrum of practical applications. A good number of dehazing techniques have already been developed. However, validation with the help of ground truth i.e. simulated haze on a clear image is an ultimate necessity. To address this issue, in this work synthetic haze images with various haze concentrations are simulated and then used to confirm the validation task of dark-channel dehazing mechanism, as it is a very promising single image dehazing technique. The simulated hazy image is developed using atmospheric model with and without Perlin noise. The effectiveness of dark-channel dehazing method is confirmed using the simulated haze images through average gradient metric, as haze reduces the gradient score.