Single Image Haze Removal
Using Dark Channel Prior
Kaiming He, Jian Sun, and Xiaoou Tang, Fellow, IEEE
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.
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1INTRODUCTION
I
MAGES of outdoor scenes are usually degraded by the
turbid medium (e.g., particles and water droplets) in
the atmosphere. Haze, fog, and smoke are such phenomena
due to atmospheric absorption and scattering. The irradiance
received by the camera from the scene point is attenuated
along the line of sight. Furthermore, the incoming light is
blended with the airlight [1]—ambient light reflected into the
line of sight by atmospheric particles. The degraded images
lose contrast and color fidelity, as shown in Fig. 1a. Since the
amount of scattering depends on the distance of the scene
points from the camera, the degradation is spatially variant.
Haze removal
1
(or dehazing) is highly desired in
consumer/computational photography and computer
vision applications. First, removing haze can significantly
increase the visibility of the scene and correct the color shift
caused by the airlight. In general, the haze-free image is
more visually pleasing. Second, most computer vision
algorithms, from low-level image analysis to high-level
object recognition, usually assume that the input image
(after radiometric calibration) is the scene radiance. The
performance of many vision algorithms (e.g., feature
detection, filtering, and photometric analysis) will inevita-
bly suffer from the biased and low-contrast scene radiance.
Last, haze removal can provide depth information and
benefit many vision algorithms and advanced image
editing. Haze or fog can be a useful depth clue for scene
understanding. A bad hazy image can be put to good use.
However, haze removal is a challenging problem because
the haze is dependent on the unknown depth. The problem is
underconstrained if the input is only a single hazy image.
Therefore, many methods have been proposed by using
multiple images or additional information. Polarization-
based methods [3], [4] remove the haze effect through two or
more images taken with different degrees of polarization. In
[5], [6], [7], more constraints are obtained from multiple
images of the same scene under different weather conditions.
Depth-based methods [8], [9] require some depth informa-
tion from user inputs or known 3D models.
Recently, single image haze removal has made significant
progresses [10], [11]. The success of these methods lies on
using stronger priors or assumptions. Tan [11] observes that
a haze-free image must have higher contrast compared with
the input hazy image and he removes haze by maximizing
the local contrast of the restored image. The results are
visually compelling but may not be physically valid. Fattal
[10] estimates the albedo of the scene and the medium
transmission under the assumption that the transmission
and the surface shading are locally uncorrelated. This
approach is physically sound and can produce impressive
results. However, it cannot handle heavily hazy images well
and may fail in the cases where the assumption is broken.
In this paper, we propose a novel prior—dark channel
prior—for single image haze removal. The dark channel prior
is based on the statistics of outdoor haze-free images. We find
that, in most of the local regions which do not cover the sky,
some pixels (called dark pixels) very often have very low
intensity in at least one color (RGB) channel. In hazy images,
the intensity of these dark pixels in that channel is mainly
contributed by the airlight. Therefore, these dark pixels can
directly provide an accurate estimation of the haze transmis-
sion. Combining a haze imaging model and a soft matting
interpolation method, we can recover a high-quality haze-
free image and produce a good depth map.
Our approach is physically valid and is able to handle
distant objects in heavily hazy images. We do not rely on
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PATTERN ANALYSIS AND MACHINE INTELLIGENCE, VOL. 33, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2011 2341
. K. He and X. Tang are with the Department of Information Engineering,
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong, China.
E-mail: {hkm007, xtang}@ie.cuhk.edu.hk.
. J. Sun is with Microsoft Research Asia, F5, #49, Zhichun Road, Haldian
District, Beijing, China. E-mail: jiansun@microsoft.com.
Manuscript received 17 Dec. 2009; revised 24 June 2010; accepted 26 June
2010; published online 31 Aug. 2010.
Recommended for acceptance by S.B. Kang.
For information on obtaining reprints of this article, please send e-mail to:
tpami@computer.org, and reference IEEECS Log Number
TPAMISI-2009-12-0832.
Digital Object Identifier no. 10.1109/TPAMI.2010.168.
1. Haze, fog, and smoke differ mainly in the material, size, shape, and
concentration of the atmospheric particles. See [2] for more details. In this
paper, we do not distinguish these similar phenomena and use the term
haze removal for simplicity.
0162-8828/11/$26.00 ß 2011 IEEE Published by the IEEE Computer Society