A novel approach for image dehazing combining visible-NIR images

Image dehazing either using single visible image or using visible and near-infrared (NIR) image pair has seen growing interest in last decade for improving visibility in landscape photographs. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for image dehazing scheme using a pair of visible and NIR images. The dehazing mechanism estimates depth map and airlight color using the visible-NIR scene statistics and uses them to form a haze-free image. Experiments on a variety of hazy images demonstrate that our method achieves high degree of detail recovery over the existing image dehazing algorithms. The resultant images exhibit a very good blend of details, contrast and color. The proposed algorithm is less computationally demanding and is fully automatic. The results are superior in both visual as well as quantitative analysis compared to state-of-the-art image dehazing algorithms.