Polarimetric dehazing method for visibility improvement based on visible and infrared image fusion

Abstract

Polarimetric dehazing methods have proven effective in enhancing the quality of chromatic hazy images. Considering that the infrared radiance has a better capacity for traveling through the haze, in this paper we propose a polarimetric dehazing method based on visible and infrared image fusion to improve the visibility of hazy images, especially for dense haze conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that the visibility of hazy images can be effectively enhanced, and the color information can be finely maintained. The visibility of dehazed images can be promoted at least 100%. This kind of dehazing method can be used widely in many dehazing applications.

Review of passive polarimetric dehazing methods

“…49 Liang et al proposed the polarimetric dehazing method that fuses the visible dehazed image and near-infrared dehazed image to advance the visibility. 88 This dehazing process for a color hazy image consists of two steps: (1) applying the basic polarimetric dehazing method to visible and near-infrared hazy images separately; (2) combining the visible and near-infrared dehazed images to obtain the final dehazed image using a fusion algorithm. Figure 16 shows the original groups of visible and near-infrared hazy images.…”

“…16 Original groups of (a) visible hazy images and (b) near-infrared hazy images. 88 method. 50,51 The process of directly fusing the hazy images together is unable to enhance the quality of hazy images in dense haze conditions.…”

Generalized Polarimetric Dehazing Method Based on Low-Pass Filtering in Frequency Domain

“…Many techniques have been proposed to enhance the quality of hazy images through image processing [3], infrared-visible image fusion [4] and polarimetric imaging [5][6][7][8]. These techniques have also been combined together, such as polarimetric imaging with image processing [9,10] and polarimetric imaging with image fusion [11], to further improve the performance. These techniques can effectively enhance the contrast of hazy images captured in scattering media, and even increase the imaging distance [2,12].…”

Realtime dehazing using colour uniformity principle

“…Hence, the priors such as haze lines and colour lines may not be appropriate in general. Some methods such as [9,10] use polariser to capture the hazy scene at various polarisation angle to dehaze the image. The focus is to perform dehazing on images captured using a conventional camera with no special hardware setup.…”