Image dehazing with hybrid total variation–L0 regularization

Abstract

We propose a dehazing problem model with hybrid regularization and design an effective algorithm to restore the latent image and transmission map simultaneously. In the proposed dehazing problem model, we use the total variation (TV) to regularize the latent image and adopt the hybrid TV and L0-norm (TV–L0) regularization to model the transmission map. In the proposed optimization algorithm, we first use the dark channel prior to achieve an initial guess of the global atmospheric light and transmission map. Then we convert the original problem into two subproblems: one aims to update the latent image based on TV regularization, whereas the other estimates the transmission map with hybrid TV–L0 regularization. Both of the subproblems can be solved efficiently with variable splitting and penalty technology, and the minimizer is reached by alternately solving the two subproblems. Experimental results show that our approach can achieve a high-quality restored image that is comparable to some state-of-the-art methods.