Single image haze removal based on saliency detection and dark channel prior

Since more and more outdoor images are often degraded by haze and suffer from bad visibility, which includes low contrast, low resolution, and high luminance, haze removal has become an important task of image restoration in recent years. In this paper, we propose a saliency prior, which introduces human visual attention mechanism into haze removal. The prior reveals the relationship between the saliency analysis and the depth of hazy scenes. In our dehazing method, firstly, saliency map and salient regions are obtained. Then, an accurate airlight and a refined transmission map can be acquired based on saliency prior and dark channel prior. Finally, we can restore the haze-free image successfully using the airlight and the transmission map. Experimental results show that our method performs much better than others in recovering large white areas that are inherently similar to the airlight.