Vedran Stipetić and Sven Lončarić, University of Zagreb, Croatia

Images taken outdoors are often degraded by atmospheric conditions such as fog and haze. These degradations can reduce contrast, blur edges, and reduce saturation of images. In this paper we propose a new method for single image dehazing. The method is based on an idea from color constancy called the gray world assumption. This assumption states that the average values of each channel in a picture are the same. Using this assumption and a haze degradation model we can quickly and accurately estimate the haze thickness and recover a haze free image. The proposed method is validated on a synthetic and natural image dataset and compared to other methods. The experimental results have shown that the proposed method provides comparable results to other dehazing methods.

image restoration, image dehazing