Joint Defogging and Demosaicking

Abstract: Image defogging is a technique used extensively for enhancing visual quality of images in bad weather condition. Even though defogging algorithms have been well studied, defogging performance is degraded by demosaicking artifacts and sensor noise amplification in distant scenes. In order to improve visual quality of restored images, we propose a novel approach to perform defogging and demosaicking simultaneously. We conclude that better defogging performance with fewer artifacts can be achieved when a defogging algorithm is combined with a demosaicking algorithm simultaneously. We also demonstrate that the proposed joint algorithm has the benefit of suppressing noise amplification in distant scene. In addition, we validate our theoretical analysis and observations for both synthesized datasets with ground truth fog-free images and natural scene datasets captured in a raw format.