Single-image night haze removal based on color channel transfer and estimation of spatial variation in atmospheric light

The visible-light imaging system used in military equipment is often subjected to severe weather conditions, such as fog, haze, and smoke, under complex lighting conditions at night that significantly degrade the acquired images. Currently available image defogging methods are mostly suitable for environments with natural light in the daytime, but the clarity of images captured under complex lighting conditions and spatial changes in the presence of fog at night is not satisfactory. This study proposes an algorithm to remove night fog from single images based on an analysis of the statistical characteristics of images in scenes involving night fog. Color channel transfer is designed to compensate for the high attenuation channel of foggy images acquired at night. The distribution of transmittance is estimated by the deep convolutional network DehazeNet, and the spatial variation of atmospheric light is estimated in a point-by-point manner according to the maximum reflection prior to recover the clear image. The results of experiments show that the proposed method can compensate for the high attenuation channel of foggy images at night, remove the effect of glow from a multi-color and non-uniform ambient source of light, and improve the adaptability and visual effect of the removal of night fog from images compared with the conventional method.