A Novel Visibility Restoration Algorithm for Single Hazy Images

The visibility of outdoor images captured in inclement weather will become degraded due to the presence of haze, fog, mist, and so on. Poor visibility caused by atmospheric phenomenon in turn causes failure in computer vision applications, such as outdoor object recognition systems, obstacle detection systems, video surveillance systems, and intelligent transportation systems. In order to solve this problem, visibility restoration techniques have been developed and play an important role in many computer vision applications. However, complete haze removal from a single image with a complex structure is difficult for visibility restoration techniques to achieve. This paper proposes a novel visibility restoration method which utilizes a combination of the median filter operation and the dark channel prior in order to achieve effective haze removal in a single image with a complex structure. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method provides superior haze removal in comparison to the previous state-of-the-art method through visual evaluation of different scenes.