Saliency-driven single image haze removal method based on reliable airlight and transmission

Haze removal has become an attractive topic in recent years and several dehazing methods are proposed. Dark channel prior (DCP) is one of the most effective dehazing approaches. However, when dealing with images containing large white objects, DCP often mistakes white objects for opaque haze. It will cause the airlight to be overestimated and the transmission to be underestimated, and thus the dehazing results have serious color distortion. In view of the above problem, saliency detection is introduced into haze removal to obtain better restored images in this paper. We first propose a method for reliable airlight estimation. Then, a saliency prior is presented for hazy images, which can distinguish white objects from dense haze by saliency detection. On the basis of saliency prior, both accurate airlight and a correct transmission map can be obtained from images containing large white objects, and finally these images can be restored successfully. The experimental results illustrate that our proposed method has great superiority in color recovery compared with other state-of-art methods when dealing with images containing large white objects.