Fast single image fog removal using edge-preserving smoothing

Imaging in poor weather is often severely degraded by scattering due to suspended particles in the atmosphere such as haze and fog. In this paper, we propose a novel fast defogging method from a single image of a scene based on the atmospheric scattering model. In the inference process of the atmospheric veil, the coarser estimate is refined using a fast edge-preserving smoothing approach. The complexity of the proposed method is only a linear function of the number of image pixels and this thus allows a very fast implementation. Results on a variety of outdoor foggy images demonstrate that the proposed method achieves good restoration for contrast and color fidelity resulting in a great improvement in image visibility.