earticle

영어

This paper presents an effective single image haze removal using edge-preserving and adaptive transmission estimation to enhance the visibility of outdoor images vulnerable to weather and environmental conditions with computational complexity reduction. The conventional methods involve the time-consuming refinement process. The proposed transmission estimation however does not require the refinement, since it preserves the edges effectively, which selects one between the pixel-based dark channel and the patch-based dark channel in the vicinity of edges. Moreover, we propose an adaptive transmission estimation to improve the visual quality particularly in bright areas like sky. Experimental results with various hazy images represent that the proposed method is superior to the conventional methods in both subjective visual quality and computational complexity. The proposed method can be adopted to compose a haze removal module for realtime devices such as mobile devices, digital cameras, autonomous vehicles, and so on as well as PCs that have enough processing resources.