Physics-based Fast Single Image Fog Removal

Imaging in the atmosphere is often degraded by scattering due to atmospheric particles such as haze, fog, and mist. In this paper, we propose a novel fast defogging method based on the atmospheric scattering model. The white balance is performed and the atmospheric scattering model is simplified prior to visibility restoration. In the inference process of the atmospheric veil, the coarser estimate is refined using a fast bilateral filtering approach that preserves edges. Finally, the scene albedo is recovered by inverting this simplified model. The complexity of the proposed method is only a linear function of the number of input image pixels and this allows a very fast implementation. Results on a variety of outdoor foggy images demonstrate that the proposed method achieves good restoration for contrast and color fidelity, resulting in a great improvement in image visibility.