Pseudo-polarimetric Method for Dense Haze Removal

The scattering and absorption by the existing particles in turbid media is severely degrading the image quality and decreasing the visibility distance, especially in dense turbid media. In this paper, we investigate the polarization property of hazy images in dense turbid media, and we propose a simple pseudo-polarimetric dehazing method for dense haze removal, which only requires a single image captured by the detector. By our proposed method, two orthogonal polarization subimages are derived from the single original image, and then, based on these two subimages, one can obtain the recovered image by using the traditional polarimetric method. The real-word experimental results verify that, for the dense haze, our method based on a single image could have a comparable or better performance compared to the traditional polarimetric dehazing method with multiple images captured at different polarization states.