Single Image Dehazing

In this talk I will present a new method for estimating the optical transmission in hazy scenes given a single input image. Based on this estimation the scattered light is eliminated to increase the visibility of the scene and recover haze-free contrasts. In this new approach we formulate a refined image formation model that accounts for surface shading in addition to the transmission function. This addition allows us to resolve ambiguities in the data by searching for a solution in which the resulting shading and transmission components are statistically uncorrelated. A similar principle is used to estimate automatically the color of the haze. I’ll show that the new method is able to significantly remove the haze layer and produce reliable transmission estimation from which we extract scene depths and use them for other applications such novel view synthesis and image refocusing.