A fast image dehazing method that does not introduce color artifacts

Javier Vazquez-Corral, Adrian Galdran, Praveen Cyriac, Marcelo Bertalmío

Abstract: We propose a method for color dehazing with four main characteristics: it does not introduce color artifacts, it does not depend on inverting any physical equation, it is based on models of visual perception, and it is fast, potentially real-time. Our method converts the original input image to the HSV color space and works in the saturation and value domains by: i) reducing the value component via a global constrained histogram flattening, ii) modifying the saturation component in consistency with the previous reduced value, and iii) performing a local contrast enhancement in the value component. Results show that our method competes with the state-of-the-art when dealing with standard hazy images, and outperforms it when dealing with challenging haze cases. Furthermore, our method is able to dehaze a FullHD image on a GPU in 90 milliseconds.