Abstract
Degraded images with light scattering and absorption such as haze, underwater and sandstorm images always suffer from low contrast, detail loss, and color distortion. To solve these problems, herein, we propose a multi-stage image restoration method which includes three steps: dehazing, detail preserving and color correction. Dehazing includes estimations of ambient light and transmission map. Ambient light is estimated by fusing scene depth map and high illumination area, and transmission map is modified by adaptive linear transformation. Then, an objective function with Relative Total Variation (RTV) and edge preservation component is proposed to preserve details and suppress noise. Finally, an effective color correction method is introduced to correct color distortion and avoid over-correction. Experiments on haze, sandstorm and underwater images demonstrate that our method can obtain high quality results with high contrast, clear visibility, and natural color. Additional experiments suggest that our method can also enhance low-light images.