Singe Image Dehazing With Unsharp Masking and Color Gamut Expansion

Image dehazing is a fundamental problem in computer vision and has hitherto engendered prodigious amounts of studies. Recently, with the well-recognized success of deep learning techniques, this field has been dominated by deep dehazing models. However, deep learning is not always a panacea, especially for the practicalities of image dehazing, because high computational complexity, expensive maintenance costs, and high carbon emission are three noticeable problems. Computational efficiency is, therefore, a decisive factor in real-world circumstances. To cope with this growing demand, we propose a linear time algorithm tailored to three primitive parts: unsharp masking (pre-processing), dehazing, and color gamut expansion (post-processing). The first enhances the sharpness according to the local variance of image intensities. The second removes haze based on the improved color attenuation prior, and the third addresses a residual effect of color gamut reduction. Extensive experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method performed comparatively with popular benchmarks, notably deep dehazing models. With such a comparative performance, the proposed method is still fast and efficient, favoring real-world computer vision systems.