Analysis of dehazing techniques on images and their applications

Outdoor imaging systems are directly affected by weather. One of the weather events affecting the imaging systems is the haze generated by water vapor. The haze not only reduces the visibility of people, but also adversely affects imaging systems. As a natural consequence, fatal, injured and materially damaged accidents occur. Therefore, image dehazing comes forward as a crucial technology in this regard. Dehazing is a process where hazy, cloudy and foggy partitions of the images are restructured such that haziness in these regions are reduced or eliminated. The haze on the images should be tended since it hinders the visibility. Also, it is important to keep the existing image features while applying dehazing techniques. There are several recommended dehazing methods. In this thesis, we investigate some of the modern methods with highest efficiency. To illustrate, the following methods have been investigated: Single Image Dehazing, Fast Visibility Restoration from a Single Color or Gray-Scale Image, Single Image Haze Removal Using Dark Channel Prior, Single Image Dehazing Based on Multiscale Product Prior, Single Image Dehazing using a Multi-Layer Perceptron. These techniques are evaluated with respect to their visual and quantitative results. Mean Squared Error and Structural Similarity methods are deployed for the quantitative analysis of the applied methods.