A joint cumulative distribution function and gradient fusion based method for dehazing of long shot hazy images

Hazy or foggy weather conditions significantly degrade the visual quality of an image in an outdoor environment. It also changes the color and reduces the contrast of an image. This paper introduces a novel single image dehazing technique to restore a hazy image without considering the physical model of haze formation. In order to find haze-free image, the proposed method does not require the transmission map and its costly refinement process. Since haze effect is dependent on the depth, it severely degrades the visibility of the objects located at a far distance. The objects close to the camera are unaffected. In this paper, we propose a fusion-based haze removal method based on the joint cumulative distribution function (JCDF) that treats faraway haze and nearby haze separately. The output images after the JCDF module, fused in the gradient domain to produce a haze-free image. The proposed method not only significantly enhances visibility but also preserves texture details. The proposed method is experimented and evaluated on a large set of challenging hazy images (large scene depth, night time, dense fog, etc.). Both qualitative and quantitative measures show that the performance of the proposed method is better than the state-of-the-art dehazing techniques.