A Novel Monitor Image De-hazing for Heavy Haze on the Freeway

On the freeway, the serious fog and haze weather frequently appears on some road sections due to the geographical factors. The haze seriously damages the image quality of the road monitoring system. In this paper, we proposed a novel monitor image de-hazing algorithm (IDHA) for the heavy haze on the freeway. IDHA can accurately segment the haze monitor image into two regions (road region and non-road region), according to the prior knowledge of edges learned by the other fine weather monitor image of the same camera. An improved guided filtering method with dark channel prior and an improved adaptive histogram equalization algorithm is used on these two regions, respectively. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm IDHA can significantly outperform the dark channel prior algorithm and histogram algorithm on the running time and the de-haze effect on the heavy haze monitor image.