Image dehazing via enhancement, restoration, and fusion: A survey

Haze usually causes severe interference to image visibility. Such degradation on images troubles both human observers and computer vision systems. To seek high-quality images from degraded ones, a large number of image dehazing algorithms have been proposed from different perspectives like image enhancement, restoration, and fusion. Especially in recent years, with the rapid development of deep learning, CNN-based methods have already dominated the mainstream of image dehazing and gained significant progress on benchmark datasets. This paper firstly presents a comprehensive survey of existing image dehazing methods, and then conducts both qualitative and quantitative comparisons among representative methods, from classic methods to recent advanced approaches. We expect the literature survey and benchmark analysis could help readers better understand the advantages and limitations of existing dehazing methods. Moreover, a discussion on possible trends in single image dehazing is put forward to innovate further works.