Image haze removal via multiscale fusion and total variation

Abstract

In foggy weather, images of outdoor scene are usually characterized with poor visibility as well as faint color saturation. The degraded hazy images may have substantial negative impact on most computer vision systems. Thus image haze removal is of the practical significance in engineering. This paper proposes a fast and effective single image haze removal algorithm on the basis of the physics imaging model. To extract the global atmospheric light accurately, we exploit multiple prior rules underlying hazy images, and put forward a novel measurement to judge the likelihood that a pixel is regarded as the global atmospheric light. In addition, the rough transmission map is estimated through a multiscale fusion process based on the Laplace pyramid transform, and refined by a total variation model. Experimental results demonstrate the proposed method outperforms most of the state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of the dehazing quality, and achieves a trade-off between the computational efficiency and haze removal capability.