Weighted haze removal method with halo prevention

•For various images, our method can obtain the comparable results.•The weighted estimation method can automatically refine a good atmospheric light.•The difference prior can detect and mitigate the halo artifact efficiently.•Our method requires low computational cost and is suitable for real-time systems.•The recovered scenes exhibit great naturalness and high visibility.

In this paper, we propose an efficient method to remove haze from a signal image based on the atmospheric scattering model and dark channel prior. Our approach applies a weighted technique that automatically finds the possible atmospheric lights, and mixes these candidates to refine the atmospheric light. Then, difference prior, a novel prior processing method, is employed for the estimation of the transmission that mitigates the halo artifact around the sharp edges. This method requires a low computational cost and is suitable for real-time applications. The experimental results show that our approach obtains the comparable results as compared with previous methods.