A Fast Single Image Fog Removal Method Using Geometric Mean Histogram Equalization

Abstract

Fog is a natural phenomenon that affects scene visibility, it reduces the contrast of the image and causes color-fade. While various works in the literature have addressed this issue, a fast effective model is still lacking. In this paper, a single image fog removal based on Geometric Mean Histogram Equalization (GMHE) is proposed. In particular, the proposed method is composed of three steps. The primary step is to adaptively tune the performance of GMHE according to the properties of the color histogram of the foggy image. The obtained result then enters two levels of chromaticity enhancement using the Hue Saturation Value (HSV) and rotors color transformations, respectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method attains high performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods in terms of quality and execution time. The evaluation is performed qualitatively by visual assessment, and quantitatively using a set of full reference and no-reference-based measures. As well, we suggest an assessment criterion to combine the results of the standard measures in a single score to facilitate the comparisons between the different fog removal methods.