• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.7
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• pp.3245-3271
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• 2016

To obtain well-dehazed images at the receiver while sustaining low bit rates in the transmission pipeline, this paper investigates the effects of image dehazing methods using dehazing contrast-enhancement filters on image compression for surveillance systems. At first, this paper proposes a novel image dehazing method by using a new method of calculating the transmission function—namely, the direct denoising method. Next, we deduce the dehazing effects of the direct denoising method and image dehazing method based on dark channel prior (DCP) on image compression in terms of ringing artifacts and blocking artifacts. It can be concluded that the direct denoising method performs better than the DCP method for decompressed (reconstructed) images. We also improve the direct denoising method to obtain more desirable dehazed images with higher contrast, using the saliency map as the guidance image to modify the transmission function. Finally, we adjust the parameters of dehazing contrast-enhancement filters to obtain a corresponding composite peak signal-to-noise ratio (CPSNR) and blind image quality assessment (BIQA) of the decompressed images. Experimental results show that different filters have different effects on image compression. Moreover, our proposed dehazing method can strike a balance between image dehazing and image compression.

• International Journal of Advanced Culture Technology
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.229-234
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• 2020

Dehazing significantly improves image quality by restoring the loss of contrast and color saturation for images taken in the presence. However, when applied to images not taken according to the prior information, dehazing can cause unintended degradation of image quality. To avoid unintended degradations, we present a hazy scene detection algorithm using a single image based on the distributions of hue, saturation, and dark channel. Through a heuristic approach, we find out statistical characteristics of the distribution of hue, saturation, and dark channels in the hazy scene and make a detection model using them. The proposed method can precede the dehazing to prevent unintended degradation. The detection performance evaluated with a set of test images shows a high hit rate with a low false alarm ratio. Ultimately the proposed method can be used to control the effect of dehazing so that the dehazing can be applied to wide variety of images without unintended degradation of image quality.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.341-363
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• 2016

Haze or fog is a common natural phenomenon. In foggy weather, the captured pictures are difficult to be applied to computer vision system, such as road traffic detection, target tracking, etc. Therefore, the image dehazing technique has become a hotspot in the field of image processing. This paper presents an overview of the existing achievements on the image dehazing technique. The intent of this paper is not to review all the relevant works that have appeared in the literature, but rather to focus on two main works, that is, image dehazing scheme based on atmospheric veil and image dehazing scheme based on dark channel prior. After the overview and a comparative study, we propose an improved image dehazing method, which is based on two image dehazing schemes mentioned above. Our image dehazing method can obtain the fog-free images by proposing a more desirable atmospheric veil and estimating atmospheric light more accurately. In addition, we adjust the transmission of the sky regions and conduct tone mapping for the obtained images. Compared with other state of the art algorithms, experiment results show that images recovered by our algorithm are clearer and more natural, especially at distant scene and places where scene depth jumps abruptly.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.15 no.12
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• pp.4420-4438
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• 2021

Image dehazing is an ill-posed problem which is far from being solved. Traditional image dehazing methods often yield mediocre effects and possess substandard processing speed, while modern deep learning methods perform best only in certain datasets. The haze removal effect when processed by said methods is unsatisfactory, meaning the generalization performance fails to meet the requirements. Concurrently, due to the limited processing speed, most dehazing algorithms cannot be employed in the industry. To alleviate said problems, a lightweight fast dehazing network based on a multiple scale-patch framework (MSP) is proposed in the present paper. Firstly, the multi-scale structure is employed as the backbone network and the multi-patch structure as the supplementary network. Dehazing through a single network causes problems, such as loss of object details and color in some image areas, the multi-patch structure was employed for MSP as an information supplement. In the algorithm image processing module, the image is segmented up and down for processed separately. Secondly, MSP generates a clear dehazing effect and significant robustness when targeting real-world homogeneous and nonhomogeneous hazy maps and different datasets. Compared with existing dehazing methods, MSP demonstrated a fast inference speed and the feasibility of real-time processing. The overall size and model parameters of the entire dehazing model are 20.75M and 6.8M, and the processing time for the single image is 0.026s. Experiments on NTIRE 2018 and NTIRE 2020 demonstrate that MSP can achieve superior performance among the state-of-the-art methods, such as PSNR, SSIM, LPIPS, and individual subjective evaluation.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.4 no.12
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• pp.571-576
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• 2015

Image dehazing has been extensively studied, but the performance evaluation method for dehazing techniques has not attracted significant interest. This paper surveys many existing performance evaluation methods of image dehazing. In order to analyze the reliability of the evaluation methods, synthetic hazy images are first reconstructed using the ground-truth color and depth image pairs, and the dehazed images are then compared with the original haze-free images. Meanwhile we also evaluate dehazing algorithms not by the dehazed images' quality but by the performance of computer vision algorithms before/after applying image dehazing. All the aforementioned evaluation methods are analyzed and compared, and research direction for improving the existing methods is discussed.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.22 no.9
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• pp.1000-1010
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• 2019

Image semantic segmentation and dehazing are key tasks in the computer vision. In recent years, researches in both tasks have achieved substantial improvements in performance with the development of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). However, most of the previous works for semantic segmentation assume the images are captured in clear weather and show degraded performance under hazy images with low contrast and faded color. Meanwhile, dehazing aims to recover clear image given observed hazy image, which is an ill-posed problem and can be alleviated with additional information about the image. In this work, we propose a deep multi-task network for simultaneous semantic segmentation and dehazing. The proposed network takes single haze image as input and predicts dense semantic segmentation map and clear image. The visual information getting refined during the dehazing process can help the recognition task of semantic segmentation. On the other hand, semantic features obtained during the semantic segmentation process can provide cues for color priors for objects, which can help dehazing process. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed multi-task approach, showing improved performance compared to the separate networks.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.417-426
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• 2023

To improve the effect of image restoration and solve the image detail loss, an image dehazing enhancement algorithm based on mean guided filtering is proposed. The superpixel calculation method is used to pre-segment the original foggy image to obtain different sub-regions. The Ncut algorithm is used to segment the original image, and it outputs the segmented image until there is no more region merging in the image. By means of the mean-guided filtering method, the minimum value is selected as the value of the current pixel point in the local small block of the dark image, and the dark primary color image is obtained, and its transmittance is calculated to obtain the image edge detection result. According to the prior law of dark channel, a classic image dehazing enhancement model is established, and the model is combined with a median filter with low computational complexity to denoise the image in real time and maintain the jump of the mutation area to achieve image dehazing enhancement. The experimental results show that the image dehazing and enhancement effect of the proposed algorithm has obvious advantages, can retain a large amount of image detail information, and the values of information entropy, peak signal-to-noise ratio, and structural similarity are high. The research innovatively combines a variety of methods to achieve image dehazing and improve the quality effect. Through segmentation, filtering, denoising and other operations, the image quality is effectively improved, which provides an important reference for the improvement of image processing technology.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.12 no.10
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• pp.5039-5055
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• 2018

The quality of natural outdoor images captured by visible camera sensors is usually degraded by the haze present in the atmosphere. In this paper, a fast image dehazing method based on visible image and near-infrared fusion is proposed. In the proposed method, a visible and a near-infrared (NIR) image of the same scene is fused based on the dual-tree complex wavelet transform (DT-CWT) to generate a dehazed color image. The color of the fusion image is regulated through haze concentration estimated by dark channel prior (DCP). The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the conventional dehazing methods and effectively solves the color distortion problem in the dehazing process.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.12 no.7
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• pp.3239-3267
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• 2018

Image and video dehazing is a popular topic in the field of computer vision and digital image processing. A fast, optimized dehazing algorithm was recently proposed that enhances contrast and reduces flickering artifacts in a dehazed video sequence by minimizing a cost function that makes transmission values spatially and temporally coherent. However, its fixed-size block partitioning leads to block effects. The temporal cost function also suffers from the temporal non-coherence of newly appearing objects in a scene. Further, the weak edges in a hazy image are not addressed. Hence, a video dehazing algorithm based on well designed spectral clustering is proposed. To avoid block artifacts, the spectral clustering is customized to segment static scenes to ensure the same target has the same transmission value. Assuming that edge images dehazed with optimized transmission values have richer detail than before restoration, an edge intensity function is added to the spatial consistency cost model. Atmospheric light is estimated using a modified quadtree search. Different temporal transmission models are established for newly appearing objects, static backgrounds, and moving objects. The experimental results demonstrate that the new method provides higher dehazing quality and lower time complexity than the previous technique.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.53 no.10
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• pp.58-65
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• 2016

This paper presents optimization techniques to reduce the processing time of the dehazing method and proposes an efficient dehazing method based on them. In the proposed techniques, the atmospheric light is estimated based on the distributed sorting of the dark channel pixels, so as to reduce the computations. The normalization process required in the transmission estimation is simplified by the assumption that the atmospheric light is monochromatic. In addition, the dark channel is modified into the median dark channel in order to eliminate the transmission refinement process while achieving a comparable dehazing quality. The proposed dehazing method based on the optimization techniques is presented and its performance is investigated by developing a prototype system. When compared to the previous method, the proposed dehazing method reduces the processing time by 65% while maintaining the dehazing quality.