Haze Removal in Color Images Using Hybrid Dark Channel Prior and Bilateral Filter

Haze formation is the combination of airlight and attenuation. Attenuation decreases the contrast and airlight increases the whiteness in the scene. Atmospheric conditions created by floting particles such as fog and haze, severely degrade image quality. Removing haze from a single image of a weather-degraded scene found to be a difficult task because the haze is dependent on the unknown depth information. Haze removal algorithms become more beneficial for many vision applications. It is found that most of the existing researchers have neglected many issues; i.e. no technique is accurate for different kind of circumstances. The existing methods have neglected many issues like noise reduction and uneven illumination which will be presented in the output image of the existing haze removal algorithms. This dissertation has proposed a new haze removal technique HDCP which will integrate dark channel prior with CLAHE to remove the haze from color images and bilateral filter is used to reduce noise from images. Poor visibility not only degrades the perceptual image quality but it also affects the performance of computer vision algorithms such as surveillance system, object detection, tracking and segmentation. The proposed algorithm is designed and implemented in MATLAB. The comparison between dark channel prior and the proposed algorithm is also drawn based upon some standard parameters. The comparison has shown that the proposed algorithm has shown quite effective results

Enhancement of Low-Quality Diatom Images using Integrated Automatic Background Removal (IABR) Method from Digital Microscopic Image

Most diatom images scanned from digital microscopes suffer from low contrast, noise, and contain unwanted floating particles and debris in a single image. Moreover, the active movement of diatom along with poor lens focusing produces a blurred image. Thus, in this paper, we introduce a new integrated automatic background removal technique (IABR) to enhance low-quality microscopic diatom images. This paper describes a two-step process of microscopic diatom image for image smoothing. First, haze removal technique is applied to the low light image to enhance and removes the image from haze and noise. Second, the background removal technique extracts the diatom cell from the background image and improves the image contrast. The output results show that the proposed IABR method has successfully enhanced and smooths low-quality diatom images by removing the image background and improving image contrast

Image Haze Removal Algorithm Based on Nonsubsampled Contourlet Transform

In order to avoid the noise diffusion and amplification caused by traditional dehazing algorithms, a single image haze removal algorithm based on nonsubsampled contourlet transform (HRNSCT) is proposed. The HRNSCT removes haze only from the low-frequency components and suppresses noise in the high-frequency components of hazy images, preventing noise amplification caused by traditional dehazing algorithms. First, the nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) is used to decompose each channel of a hazy and noisy color image into low-frequency sub-band and high-frequency direction sub-bands. Second, according to the low-frequency sub-bands of the three channels, the color attenuation prior and dark channel prior are combined to estimate the transmission map, and use the transmission map to dehaze the low frequency sub-bands. Then, to achieve the noise suppression and details enhancement of the dehazed image, the high-frequency direction sub-bands of the three channels are shrunk, and those shrunk sub-bands are enhanced according to the transmission map. Finally, the nonsubsampled contourlet inverse transform is performed on the dehazed low-frequency sub-bands and enhanced high-frequency sub-bands to reconstruct the dehazed and noise-suppressed image. The experimental results show that the HRNSCT provides excellent haze removal and noise suppression performance and prevents noise amplification during dehazing, making it well suited for removing haze from noisy images