• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.52 no.11
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• pp.115-123
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• 2015

The infrared light is known to be less dependent on background light compared to the visible light, and thus many applications such as remote sensing and image surveillance use the infrared image. Similar to color images, infrared images can also be degraded by hazy weather condition, and consequently the performance of the infrared image-based applications can decrease. Nevertheless, infrared image dehazing has not received significant interest. In this paper, we analyze the characteristic of infrared images, especially near-infrared (NIR) images, and present an NIR dehazing algorithm using the analyzed characteristics. In particular, a machine learning framework is adopted to obtain an accurate transmission map and several post-processing methods are used for further refinement. Experimental results show that the proposed NIR dehazing algorithm outperforms the conventional color image dehazing method for NIR image dehazing.