Visibility enhancement using an image filtering approach

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Abstract
The misty, foggy, or hazy weather conditions lead to image color distortion and reduce the resolution and the contrast of the observed object in outdoor scene acquisition. In order to detect and remove haze, this article proposes a novel effective algorithm for visibility enhancement from a single gray or color image. Since it can be considered that the haze mainly concentrates in one component of the multilayer image, the haze-free image is reconstructed through haze layer estimation based on the image filtering approach using both low-rank technique and the overlap averaging scheme. By using parallel analysis with Monte Carlo simulation from the coarse atmospheric veil by the median filter, the refined smooth haze layer is acquired with both less texture and retaining depth changes. With the dark channel prior, the normalized transmission coefficient is calculated to restore fogless image. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is a simpler and efficient method for clarity improvement and contrast enhancement from a single foggy image. Moreover, it can be comparable with the state-of-the-art methods, and even has better results than them.

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