Physics-based fast single image fog removal

Imaging in poor weather is often severely degraded by scattering due to suspended particles in the atmosphere such as haze, fog and mist. Poor visibility becomes a major problem for most outdoor vision applications. In this paper, we propose a novel fast defogging method from a single image of a scene based on a fast bilateral filtering approach. The complexity of our method is only a linear function of the number of input image pixels and this thus allows a very fast implementation. Results on a variety of outdoor foggy images demonstrate that our method achieves good restoration for contrast and color fidelity, resulting in a large improvement in image visibility.