Fast single-image dehazing method for visible-light systems

Abstract

Optical imaging systems are often degraded by scattering due to atmospheric particles such as haze, fog, and mist. According to the physical model of atmospheric scattering, two major factors that affect the effect of fog removal are discussed. By using joint probability density definition and the proposed joint mean shift filtering algorithm, discontinuity preserving smoothing and image segmentation are addressed in the sequel to refine the atmospheric veil and estimate the atmospheric light, which overcomes the inherent limitations of the state-of-the-art methods. Simulation results on a variety of outdoor foggy images demonstrate that the proposed method achieves short computation time and good restoration for visibility and color fidelity. An embedded vision enhanced system based on a DSP is designed and runs the proposed algorithm at 15 fps for a color frame of 720×576 pixels .