Fast single haze image enhancement

• A method simultaneously dehazing image and enhancing sharpness is proposed.
• We fuse two transmission maps generated by dark channel prior to dehaze image.
• Sharpness enhancement is carried out using modified unsharp masking framework.
• The main advantage of the proposed approach is its higher speed.

This paper presents a new method for fast single haze image enhancement without using any extra information. The proposed approach simultaneously dehazes image and enhances sharpness by means of individual treatment of the model component and the residual. In the haze removing stage, two coarse transmission maps using dark channel prior are fused. One is obtained based on single-point pixel and the other is obtained by patch. For the sake of dehazing and enhancing sharpness simultaneously, a modified unsharp masking framework is applied to control the effectiveness of sharpness by constructing a sigmoid function adaptively. The main advantage of the proposed approach compared with others is its higher speed. This speed allows the enhanced haze image to be applied in real-time processing applications. A comparative experiment with a few other state of the art algorithms shows similar or better visual results.

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