Single Image Dehazing Based on Dark Channel Prior and Energy Minimization

Hazy images have limited visibility and low contrast. The degradation is expressed by transmission map, which is one of the most important estimates of single image dehazing. Transmission map estimation is an underconstraint problem, and lots of priors have been proposed. Among them, the dark channel prior is widely recognized. However, traditional methods have not fully exploited its power due to improper assumptions or operations, which cause unwanted artifacts. The postrefinement algorithms employed to remove these artifacts in turn undermine the merits of the prior. In this letter, a novel method for estimating transmission map by energy minimization is proposed to solve this problem. The energy function combines the dark channel prior with piecewise smoothness. The method is compared to the state-of-theart methods and shows outstanding performance.