Single image haze removal with WLS-based edge-preserving smoothing filter

Images captured under hazy conditions have low contrast and poor color. This is primarily due to air-light which degrades image quality according to the transmission map. The approach to enhance these hazy images we introduce here is based on the `Dark-Channel Prior' method with image refinement by the `Weighted Least Square' based edge-preserving smoothing. Local contrast is further enhanced by multi-scale tone manipulation. The proposed method improves the contrast, color and detail for the entire image domain effectively. In the experiment, we compare the proposed method with conventional methods to validate performance.