Haze Scene Detection based on Hue, Saturation, and Dark Channel Distributions

Haze Scene Detection based on Hue, Saturation, and Dark Channel Distributions

Dehazing significantly improves image quality by restoring the loss of contrast and color saturation for images taken in the presence. However, when applied to images not taken according to the prior information, dehazing can cause unintended degradation of image quality. To avoid unintended degradations, we present a hazy scene detection algorithm using a single image based on the distributions of hue, saturation, and dark channel. Through a heuristic approach, we find out statistical characteristics of the distribution of hue, saturation, and dark channels in the hazy scene and make a detection model using them. The proposed method can precede the dehazing to prevent unintended degradation. The detection performance evaluated with a set of test images shows a high hit rate with a low false alarm ratio. Ultimately the proposed method can be used to control the effect of dehazing so that the dehazing can be applied to wide variety of images without unintended degradation of image quality.