• 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.

• Journal of Platform Technology
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• v.11 no.6
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• pp.68-78
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• 2023

In this paper, the color distortion in images with haze would be analyzed. When haze is included in the scene, the color signal reflected in the scene is accompanied by color distortion due to the influence of transmittance according to the haze component. When the influence of haze is excluded by a conventional de-hazing method, the distortion of color tends to not be sufficiently resolved. Khoury et al. used the dark channel priority technique, a haze model mentioned in many studies, to determine the degree of color distortion. However, only the tendency of distortion such as color error values was confirmed, and specific color distortion analysis was not performed. This paper analyzes the characteristic of color distortion and proposes a restoration method that can reduce color distortion. Input images of databases used by Khoury et al. include Macbeth color checker, a standard color tool. Using Macbeth color checker's color values, color distortion according to changes in haze concentration was analyzed, and a new color distortion model was proposed through modeling. The proposed method is to obtain a mapping function using the change in chromaticity by step according to the change in haze concentration and the color of the ground truth. Since the form of color distortion varies from step to step in proportion to the haze concentration, it is necessary to obtain an integrated thought function that operates stably at all stages. In this paper, the improvement of color distortion through the proposed method was estimated based on the value of angular error, and it was verified that there was an improvement effect of about 15% compared to the conventional method.