• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.54 no.8
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• pp.45-52
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• 2017

This paper presents a high-performance software-hardware dehazing system based on a dedicated hardware accelerator for the haze removal. In the proposed system, the dedicated hardware accelerator performs the dark-channel-prior-based dehazing process, and the software performs the other control processes. For this purpose, the dehazing process is realized as an OpenCL kernel by finding the inherent parallelism in the algorithm and is synthesized into a hardware by employing a high-level-synthesis technique. The proposed system executes the dehazing process much faster than the previous software-only dehazing system: the performance improvement is up to 96.3% in terms of the execution time.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.53 no.10
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• pp.58-65
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• 2016

This paper presents optimization techniques to reduce the processing time of the dehazing method and proposes an efficient dehazing method based on them. In the proposed techniques, the atmospheric light is estimated based on the distributed sorting of the dark channel pixels, so as to reduce the computations. The normalization process required in the transmission estimation is simplified by the assumption that the atmospheric light is monochromatic. In addition, the dark channel is modified into the median dark channel in order to eliminate the transmission refinement process while achieving a comparable dehazing quality. The proposed dehazing method based on the optimization techniques is presented and its performance is investigated by developing a prototype system. When compared to the previous method, the proposed dehazing method reduces the processing time by 65% while maintaining the dehazing quality.