Single Image Dehazing Using Global Illumination Compensation

The existing dehazing algorithms hardly consider background interference in the process of estimating the atmospheric illumination value and transmittance, resulting in an unsatisfactory dehazing effect. In order to solve the problem, this paper proposes a novel global illumination compensation-based image-dehazing algorithm (GIC). The GIC method compensates for the intensity of light scattered when light passes through atmospheric particles such as fog. Firstly, the illumination compensation was accomplished in the CIELab color space using the shading partition enhancement mechanism. Secondly, the atmospheric illumination values and transmittance parameters of these enhanced images were computed to improve the performance of atmospheric-scattering models, in order to reduce the interference of background signals. Eventually, the dehazing result maps with reduced background interference were obtained with the computed atmospheric-scattering model. The dehazing experiments were carried out on the public data set, and the dehazing results of the foggy image were compared with cutting-edge dehazing algorithms. The experimental results illustrate that the proposed GIC algorithm shows enhanced consistency with the real-imaging situation in estimating atmospheric illumination and transmittance. Compared with established image-dehazing methods, the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and the structural similarity (SSIM) metrics of the proposed GIC method increased by 3.25 and 0.084, respectively.