Dehazing quality evaluation algorithm integrating dark channel theory and image depth estimation

Abstract

Image dehazing is an important research topic and hotspot in the fields of image processing and computer vision. Therefore, evaluating the performance of image dehazing algorithms has become an import research issue. However, current image quality assessment (IQA) algorithms only judge the final dehazed image and do not give an analysis of the capabilities of the image dehazing algorithm. In order to fill this gap, we propose an image dehazing quality assessment method that integrated the dark channel prior with image depth estimation. The proposed method first uses the dark channel prior to estimate the absolute amount of haze removed from each pixel as an indication of the performance of dehazing. Then, a dual-scale variance ratio method is introduced to estimate the scene depth of the image. Finally, the relative dehazing is calculated from the obtained absolute dehazing and the image depth to represent the capability of the dehazing algorithm. The method proposed in this paper first introduces the concepts of relative and absolute dehazing quantities, along with pioneering a pixellevel evaluation of dehazing outcomes. Extensive experiments show that the algorithm proposed in this paper is more in line with human subjective judgment than other IQA algorithms.