Single image haze removal considering sensor blur and noise

Abstract

Images of outdoor scenes are usually degraded under bad weather conditions, which results in a hazy image. To date, most haze removal methods based on a single image have ignored the effects of sensor blur and noise. Therefore, in this paper, a three-stage algorithm for haze removal, considering sensor blur and noise, is proposed. In the first stage, we preprocess the degraded image and eliminate the blur/noise interference to estimate the hazy image. In the second stage, we estimate the transmission and atmospheric light by the dark channel prior method. In the third stage, a regularized method is proposed to recover the underlying image. Experimental results with both simulated and real data demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is effective, based on both the visual effect and quantitative assessment. © 2013 Lan et al.; licensee Springer.