Abstract:
The quality of images captured in bad weather is often affected by chromatic casts and low visibility due to
the presence of atmospheric particles. Restoration of the
color balance is often ignored in most of the existing image
de-hazing methods. In this paper, we propose a varicolored end-to-end image de-hazing network which restores
the color balance in a given varicolored hazy image and
recovers the haze-free image. The proposed network comprises of 1) Haze color correction (HCC) module and 2)
Visibility improvement (VI) module. The proposed HCC
module provides required attention to each color channel
and generates color balanced hazy image. While the proposed VI module processes the color balanced hazy image
through novel inception attention block to recover the hazefree image. We also propose a novel approach to generate a
large-scale varicolored synthetic hazy image database. An
ablation study has been carried out to demonstrate the effect of different factors on the performance of the proposed
network for image de-hazing. Three benchmark synthetic
datasets have been used for quantitative analysis of the proposed network. Visual results on set of real-world hazy images captured in different weather conditions demonstrate
the effectiveness of the proposed approach for varicolored
image de-hazing.
