Fusion strategy for single image dehazing

The objective of image enhancement is to process a given image so that the result is more suitable than the original image for a specific application. Images of scenes acquired in bad weather have poor contrasts and colors. It is known that the degradation of image quality due to bad weather is exponential in the depths of the scene points. Therefore, restoring scene colors and contrasts from a single image of the scene is inherently under-constrained. From this original degraded image, fusion strategy aims to dehaze the image and improve its visual quality. It is a single image approach that enhances the visibility of such degraded scenes by performing a haze detection first. For further preprocessing two inputs are derived, they are the white balanced and contrast enhanced versions of the original hazy image. Then certain weight maps are defined and these weight maps aim to increase the visibility of the scene. To minimize artifacts introduced by the weight maps, a multi-scale representation is designed. Finally fusion of these inputs and weight maps yields final dehazed output.