HAZE AND CONVERGENCE MODELS: EXPERIMENTAL COMPARISON

Bad environmental conditions like bad weather, such as fog and haze, and smoke-filled monitored closed areas, cause a degradation and a loss in contrast and color information in images. Unlike outdoor scenes imaged in a foggy day, an indoor artificial hazy scene can be acquired in controlled conditions, while the clear image is always available when the smoke is dispersed. This can help to investigate models of haze and evaluate dehazing algorithms. Thus, an artificial indoor scene was set up in a closed area with a mean to control the amount of haze within this scene. While a convergence model simulates correctly a small amount of haze, it fails to reproduce the same perceived hazy colors of the real image when haze density is high. This difference becomes obvious when the same dehazing method is applied to both images. Unlike simulated images, colors in real hazy images are resulted from environmental illuminants interference.