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A fast image dehazing method that does not introduce color artifacts

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Abstract

We propose a method for color dehazing with four main characteristics: it does not introduce color artifacts, it does not depend on inverting any physical equation, it is based on models of visual perception, and it is fast, potentially real time. Our method converts the original input image to the HSV color space and works in the saturation and value domains by: (1) reducing the value component via a global constrained histogram flattening; (2) modifying the saturation component in consistency with the previous reduced value; and (3) performing a local contrast enhancement in the value component. Results show that our method competes with the state-of-the-art when dealing with standard hazy images, and outperforms it when dealing with challenging haze cases. Furthermore, our method is able to dehaze a FullHD image on a GPU in 90 ms.

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Acknowledgements

This work has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement number 761544 (project HDR4EU) and under grant agreement number 780470 (project SAUCE), and by the Spanish government and FEDER Fund, grant ref. TIN2015-71537-P (MINECO/FEDER,UE). JVC was supported by the Spanish government, grant ref. IJCI-2014-19516. The NVIDIA Titan X used for this research was donated by the NVIDIA corporation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information and Communications Technologies, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain

    Javier Vazquez-Corral, Praveen Cyriac & Marcelo Bertalmío

  2. INESC TEC, R. Dr. Roberto Frias, 4200, Porto, Portugal

    Adrian Galdran

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  1. Javier Vazquez-Corral
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Correspondence to Javier Vazquez-Corral.

Appendix: sRGB/HSV color conversions

Appendix: sRGB/HSV color conversions

1.1 From sRGB to HSV

Given a pixel (R, G, B) in sRGB space, we start by defining \(M={\text {max}}(R,G,B)\) and \(m={\text {min}}(R,G,B)\). Let us also define an auxiliary variable \(H'\) in the following way

$$\begin{aligned} H' = {\left\{ \begin{array}{ll} 0 &{} \quad \text {if } M-n=0.\\ \frac{G-B}{M-m} \mod 6 &{} \quad \text {if } M=R.\\ \frac{B-R}{M-m}+2 &{} \quad \text {if } M=G.\\ \frac{R-G}{M-m}+4 &{} \quad \text {if } M=B.\\ \end{array}\right. } \end{aligned}$$
(9)

Then, the HSV coordinates are defined as

$$H = H'\times 360.$$
(10)
$$S = \frac{M-m}{M}.$$
(11)
$$V=M.$$
(12)

1.2 From HSV to sRGB

Given a pixel (H, S, V) in the HSV space we start by defining \(C=S\times V\), \(H'=\frac{H}{60}\), \(X=C\times (1- \Vert H' \mod 2 -1\Vert )\), and \(m=V-C\). Then the pixel value in sRGB color space is defined as

$$\begin{aligned} (R,G,B) = {\left\{ \begin{array}{ll} (m,m,m) &{} \quad \text {if } C=0.\\ (C+m,X+m,m) &{} \quad \text {if } 0\le H' \le 1.\\ (X+m,C+m,m) &{} \quad \text {if } 1\le H' \le 2.\\ (m,C+m,X+m) &{} \quad \text {if } 2\le H' \le 3.\\ (m,X+m,C+m) &{} \quad \text {if } 3\le H' \le 4.\\ (X+m,m,C+m) &{} \quad \text {if } 4\le H' \le 5.\\ (C+m,m,X+m) &{} \quad \text {if } 5\le H' \le 6.\\ \end{array}\right. } \end{aligned}$$
(13)

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Vazquez-Corral, J., Galdran, A., Cyriac, P. et al. A fast image dehazing method that does not introduce color artifacts. J Real-Time Image Proc 17, 607–622 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11554-018-0816-6

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