Nighttime haze removal based on a new imaging model

Nighttime haze removal is important for different applications such as nighttime video surveillance in haze environment. Different from the imaging conditions in the daytime, nighttime haze images may suffer from non-uniform illumination from artificial light sources. In this paper, we proposed a novel efficient dehazing method with illumination estimation for nighttime haze condition. First, we estimate the light intensity and enhance it to obtain an illumination balanced result. Then, we process a color correction step after estimating the color characteristics of the incident light. Finally, we remove the haze by using the dark channel prior along with estimating the pointwise environmental light. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve both illumination balanced and haze free results. Moreover, it also has good color rendition ability.