Remote Sensing Image Dehazing via RGB-Space Physical Constraints

Haze commonly degrades visible-spectrum remote sensing (RS) images by reducing contrast and distorting colors. Existing RS dehazing methods still face two limitations. Prior-driven methods rely on handcrafted assumptions that may become unreliable in complex wide-area scenes without explicit sky regions. Learning-based methods require paired training data, yet real aligned hazy/haze-free RS image pairs are difficult to collect, which limits their real-world generalization. To address these limitations, we propose a method called Remote Sensing Image Dehazing via RGB-Space Physical Constraints (RDPC). The new method revisits the atmospheric scattering model (ASM) from the perspective of RS imaging and builds the restoration process on several physical properties of hazy image formation. For atmospheric light estimation, the RGB-space line-convergence behavior of local regions with similar reflectance and slight depth variations is exploited, allowing atmospheric light to be estimated without explicit sky areas. For transmission estimation, the geometric relation between observed pixels and atmospheric light is used in RGB space, where local perpendicularity provides physically plausible haze-removal guidance and global compensation helps avoid excessive darkening and color degradation. The estimated transmission and albedo guidance are further refined by enforcing ASM consistency and variation sparsity through joint optimization. Experiments on synthetic and real-world RS image dehazing benchmarks demonstrate that RDPC achieves competitive performance against representative prior-based and learning-based methods, including Image Dehazing and Exposure (IDE), Iterative Predictor-Critic (IPC), Curvature-to-Plane Prior (C2P), Adaptive Structure-Texture Awareness (ASTA), Asymmetric U-Net (AU-Net), Efficient Multi-scale Prior Fusion (EMPF), and Lightweight Feature Dehazing (LFD), in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index measure (SSIM), learned perceptual image patch similarity (LPIPS), Blind/Referenceless Image Spatial Quality Evaluator (BRISQUE), neural image assessment (NIMA), and processing time.