IMPROVED SINGLE IMAGE DEHAZING BY FUSION

One of the major problems in image processing is the restoration of images corrupted by various types of degradations. Images of outdoor scenes often contain atmospheric degradation, such as haze and fog caused by particles in the atmospheric medium absorbing and scattering light as it travels to the observer. Although, this effect may be desirable from an artistic stand point, for a variety of reasons one may need to restore an image corrupted by these effects, a process generally referred to as haze removal. This paper introduces improved haze removal technique based on fusion strategy that combines two derived images from original image. These images can be obtain by performing white balancing and contrast enhancement operation. These derived images are weighted by specific weight map followed by Laplacian and Gaussian pyramid representations to reduce artifacts introduce due to weight maps. Unlike other techniques this approach requires only original degraded image to remove haze which makes it simple, straightforward and effective.