Hierarchical haze removal using dark channel prior

The haze removal algorithm using dark channel prior, which was proposed by He et al., is an efficient algorithm and presents impressive results. But its high memory and computational requirements limit its applications. In this paper, we propose a method to improve the memory usage and calculation speed. We notice that the matting process accounts for most calculation time, so we replace the matting process with a fast bilateral filtering scheme. Using the bilateral filter, we can reduce the memory usage, but its computational complexity is still high. To reduce the computational complexity as well, we adapt a hierarchical structure for the bilateral filtering. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can remove haze in a picture effectively, while requiring much less computations than the He et al.'s method.