Fast smoothing technique with edge preservation for single image dehazing

In the single-image dehazing problem, it is critical that the transmission is accurately estimated. However, the extracted transmission in the dark channel model cannot effectively deal with the edge and the sky area because of the poor applicability of the dark channel prior to these areas. This study aims to solve that problem by proposing a novel variational model (VM) to optimise the transmission. This VM introduces a smoothness term and a gradient-preserving term to mitigate the false edge and the distorted sky area in the recovered image. Further, a fast algorithm to solve the VM is proposed on the basis of the additional operator splitting algorithm. This algorithm is an effective linear time algorithm and has excellent performance on optimising the transmission. The average running time of the algorithm shows an improvement of over 20 times that of the guided image filtering in these experiments. Experimental results also show that the proposed algorithm is both effective and efficient for optimising the transmission.