Improving Performance of Machine Learning-based Haze Removal Algorithms with Enhanced Training Database

Haze removal is an object of scientific desire due to its various practical applications. Existing algorithms are founded upon histogram equalization, contrast maximization, or the growing trend of applying machine learning in image processing. Since machine learning-based algorithms solve problems based on the data, they usually perform better than those based on traditional image processing/computer vision techniques. However, to achieve such a high performance, one of the requisites is a large and reliable training database, which seems to be unattainable owing to the complexity of real hazy and haze-free images acquisition. As a result, researchers are currently using the synthetic database, obtained by introducing the synthetic haze drawn from the standard uniform distribution into the clear images. In this paper, we propose the enhanced equidistribution, improving upon our previous study on equidistribution, and use it to make a new database for training machine learning-based haze removal algorithms. A large number of experiments verify the effectiveness of our proposed methodology.