Implementation of a single-image haze removal using the FPGA

A comparison of the numbers of cloudy days and clear days shows a recent increase of the former because of fine or yellow dust. Although imaging systems are used in various fields, the imagequality degradation that is due to fog is an outstanding problem. In this paper, a hardware method for the removal of the haze from a single input image using the dark channel prior and the FPGA is proposed; furthermore, a high-quality depth map can be used for fog removal. The problem of the existing haze-removal algorithms is the recognition of the high RGB values as haze, resulting in a loss of the high RGB values. The use of the average atmospheric values, however, implements a high-level transmission map that prevents the loss of the high RGB values (recognized as haze) during the haze removal. In addition, an 8 x 5 matrix is created to improve the speed of the dark-channel calculation, resulting in a speed of more than 500 fps.