Abstract—In this paper, we propose a simple but effective image prior—dark channel prior to remove haze from a single input image.
The dark channel prior is a kind of statistics of outdoor haze-free images. It is based on a key observation—most local patches in
outdoor haze-free images contain some pixels whose intensity is very low in at least one color channel. Using this prior with the haze
imaging model, we can directly estimate the thickness of the haze and recover a high-quality haze-free image. Results on a variety of
hazy images demonstrate the power of the proposed prior. Moreover, a high-quality depth map can also be obtained as a byproduct of
haze removal.
Index Terms—Dehaze, defog, image restoration, depth estimation.
