A Novel Fast Single Image Dehazing Algorithm Based on Artificial Multiexposure Image Fusion

Abstract

Poor weather conditions, such as fog, haze, and mist, cause visibility degradation in captured images. Existing imaging devices lack the ability to effectively and efficiently mitigate the visibility degradation caused by poor weather conditions in real time. Image depth information is used to eliminate hazy effects by using existing physical model-based approaches. However, the imprecise depth information always affects dehazing performance. This article proposes an image fusion-based algorithm to enhance the performance and robustness of image dehazing. Based on a set of gamma-corrected underexposed images, pixelwise weight maps are constructed by analyzing both global and local exposedness to guide the fusion process. The spatial-dependence of luminance of the fused image is reduced, and its color saturation is balanced in the dehazing process. The performance of the proposed solution is confirmed in both theoretical analysis and comparative experiments.