Single image mixed dehazing method based on numerical iterative model and DehazeNet.

• Main Authors: Wenjiang Jiao, Xingwu Jia, Yuetong Liu, Qun Jiang, Ziyi Sun
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2021-01-01
• Series: PLoS ONE
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0254664

As one of the most common adverse weather phenomena, haze has caused detrimental effects on many computer vision systems. To eliminate the effect of haze, in the field of image processing, image dehazing has been studied intensively, and many advanced dehazing algorithms have been proposed. Physical model-based and deep learning-based methods are two competitive methods for single image dehazing, but it is still a challenging problem to achieve fidelity and effectively dehazing simultaneously in real hazy scenes. In this work, a mixed iterative model is proposed, which combines a physical model-based method with a learning-based method to restore high-quality clear images, and it has good performance in maintaining natural attributes and completely removing haze. Unlike previous studies, we first divide the image into different regions according to the density of haze to accurately calculate the atmospheric light for restoring haze-free images. Then, dark channel prior and DehazeNet are used to jointly estimate the transmission to promote the final clear haze-free image that is more similar to the real scene. Finally, a numerical iterative strategy is employed to further optimize the atmospheric light and transmission. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on synthetic datasets and real-world datasets. Moreover, to indicate the universality of the proposed method, we further apply it to the remote sensing datasets, which can also produce visually satisfactory results.