An enhanced window-variant dark channel prior for depth estimation using single foggy image

The dark channel prior is a simple yet efficient way to estimate the scene depth information using one single foggy image. However the prior fails for pixels with low colour saturation. Based on the observation that areas with dramatic colour changes tend to belong to similar depth, a window variation mechanism is proposed in this paper based on the neighbourhood scene complexity and colour saturation rate to achieve an ideal compromise between depth resolution and precision. The proposed method greatly alleviates the intrinsic drawbacks of the original dark channel prior. Experiments show the proposed method produces more accurate depth estimation in most of the scenes than the original prior.