  The quality of images captured in outdoor environments can be affected by
poor weather conditions such as fog, dust, and atmospheric scattering of other
particles. This problem can bring extra challenges to high-level computer
vision tasks like image segmentation and object detection. However, previous
studies on image dehazing suffer from a huge computational workload and
corruption of the original image, such as over-saturation and halos. In this
paper, we present a novel image dehazing approach based on the optical model
for haze images and regularized optimization. Specifically, we convert the
non-convex, bilinear problem concerning the unknown haze-free image and light
transmission distribution to a convex, linear optimization problem by
estimating the atmosphere light constant. Our method is further accelerated by
introducing a multilevel Haar wavelet transform. The optimization, instead, is
applied to the low frequency sub-band decomposition of the original image. This
dimension reduction significantly improves the processing speed of our method
and exhibits the potential for real-time applications. Experimental results
show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art dehazing algorithms in
terms of both image reconstruction quality and computational efficiency. For
implementation details, source code can be publicly accessed via
http://github.com/JiaxiHe/Image-and-Video-Dehazing.
