An Investigation of Dehazing Effects on Image and Video Coding

This paper makes an investigation of the dehazing effects on image and video coding for surveillance systems. The goal is to achieve good dehazed images and videos at the receiver while sustaining low bitrates (using compression) in the transmission pipeline. At first, this paper proposes a novel method for single-image dehazing, which is used for the investigation. It operates at a faster speed than current methods and can avoid halo effects by using the median operation. We then consider the dehazing effects in compression by investigating the coding artifacts and motion estimation in cases of applying any dehazing method before or after compression. We conclude that better dehazing performance with fewer artifacts and better coding efficiency is achieved when the dehazing is applied before compression. Simulations for Joint Photographers Expert Group images in addition to subjective and objective tests with H.264 compressed sequences validate our conclusion.