An Improved Air-Light Estimation Scheme for Single Haze Images Using Color Constancy Prior

원문 초록

Hazy environment attenuates the scene radiance and causes difficulty in distinguishing the color and texture of the scene. A crucial step in dehazing is the recovery of the global air-light vector. Traditional methods usually interpret the RGB value of the brightest region in haze images as the air-light. In this letter, a new prior called ‘color constancy prior’ has been proposed to improve the robustness of air-light estimation when varicolored illumination exists.The prior utilizes the statistical observation that distant scenery objects become the most haze-opaque due to the pixel escalation towards the higher intensity side. The comparative evaluation on a variety of haze images manifests that the proposed prior perform better than existing air-light recovery methods and can be used for subsequent dehazing applications.