Nighttime haze removal using color transfer pre-processing and Dark Channel Prior

Removing nighttime haze technique is an important and necessary procedure to avoid ill-condition visibility of human eyes. To increase the visibility of the scene, there are some existing methods for dehazing in the daytime. Specifically, these methods have a satisfactory dehazing quality in the daytime but most of them are not all successful in the nighttime. In this paper, the proposed method can be properly applied nighttime haze images even they have some ill-properties of low overall contrast, low overall brightness, and “blue shift” airlight color. The basic concept of proposed method is to use color transfer 7, refined Dark Channel Prior (DCP), and Bilateral Filter in Local Contrast Correction (BFLCC)5. Experimental results show that the proposed method has the reliable capabilities for removing nighttime haze and attractive for some applications such as computer vision, vehicle, aviation and national defense security.