Image Haze Removal Techniques – A Personal Perspective and Assessment

Abstract

Image haze removal has become an important research direction in the field of computer vision because of the vast development and increasing demand of its applications. In the present era, where uploading images in social media has become very common, the image editing and processing applications has gained much popularity. Outdoor images that are captured in bad weather are seriously degraded due to several factors. Haze, being the most common degrading factor, affects the visibility of the images and makes them unclear. Haze is formed due to a combination of two fundamental phenomena namely, attenuation and airlight. Attenuation deteriorates the scene contrast and air light increases the whiteness in the scene. Therefore, the removal of attenuation and airlight helps to restore the color and contrast of the images, making them haze-free. Different works have been proposed till date inorder to filter out haze from images. This paper analyses the different image haze removal techniques. The different techniques, along with their merits and demerits are discussed.
Keywords: Atmospheric Scattering Model ; Dehazing ; Haze removal ; Image Processing ; Image restoration ; Scene radiance recovery ;