Published Paper Details:

In the real-time outdoor application of computer vision-based systems, haze removal, a technique that can recover clear images from foggy ones, is necessary for further image processing. Therefore, in this paper, an efficient haze removal method suitable for very-large-scale integration (VLSI) implementation is proposed to obtain high quality fog-free images. Based on the atmosphere scattering model and the dark channel prior method, the atmospheric light of the whole image and the transmission map can be extracted. These are important parameters of the recovery model. Instead of using single global atmospheric light to restore foggy image, local atmospheric light is estimated and applied in the proposed design to achieve optimal results. To ensure that the overall image is consistent without block artefacts, a local atmospheric light is dynamically adjusted based on the global atmospheric light. Additionally, to obtain a transmission map, a refined estimation method is performed to reduce the halo effect. To meet the requirements of real-time applications, six-stage VLSI architecture for the proposed algorithm is implemented.