Lower Bound on Transmission Using Non-Linear Bounding Function in Single Image Dehazing

Abstract

The visibility of an image captured in poor weather (such as haze, fog, mist, smog) degrades due to scattering of light by atmospheric particles. Single image dehazing (SID) methods are used to restore visibility from a single hazy image. The SID is a challenging problem due to its ill-posed nature. Typically, the atmospheric scattering model (ATSM) is used to solve SID problem. The transmission and atmospheric light are two prime parameters of ATSM. The accuracy and effectiveness of SID depends on accurate value of transmission and atmospheric light. The proposed method translates transmission estimation problem into estimation of the difference between minimum color channel of hazy and haze-free image. The translated problem presents a lower bound on transmission and is used to minimize reconstruction error in dehazing. The lower bound depends upon the bounding function (BF) and a quality control parameter. A non-linear model is then proposed to estimate BF for accurate estimation of transmission. The proposed quality control parameter can be utilized to tune the effect of dehazing. The accuracy obtained by the proposed method for transmission is compared with state of the art dehazing methods. Visual comparison of dehazed images and objective evaluation further validates the effectiveness of the proposed method.