Near-infrared guided color image dehazing

Near-infrared (NIR) light has stronger penetration capability than visible light due to its long wavelengths and is thus less scattered by particles in the air. This makes it desirable for image dehazing to unveil details of distant objects in landscape photographs. In this paper, we propose an improved image dehazing scheme using a pair of color and NIR images, which effectively estimates the airlight color and transfers details from the NIR. A two-stage dehazing method is proposed by exploiting the dissimilarity between RGB and NIR for airlight color estimation, followed by a dehazing procedure through an optimization framework. Experiments on captured haze images show that our method can achieve substantial improvements on the detail recovery and the color distribution over the existing image dehazing algorithms.