Fog Removal from Color Images using Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization

The images degraded by fog suffer from poor contrast. In order to remove fog effect, a Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE)-based method is presented in this paper. This method establishes a maximum value to clip the histogram and redistributes the clipped pixels equally to each gray-level. It can limit the noise while enhancing the image contrast. In our method, firstly, the original image is converted from RGB to HSI. Secondly, the intensity component of the HSI image is processed by CLAHE. Finally, the HSI image is converted back to RGB image. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we experiment with a color image degraded by fog and apply the edge detection to the image. The results show that our method is effective in comparison with traditional methods.