DehazeGlasses

Abstract

We present DehazeGlasses, a see-through visual haze removal system that optically dehazes the user's field of vision. Human vision suffers from a degraded view due to aspects of the scene environment, such as haze. Such degradation may interfere with our behavior or judgement in daily tasks. We focus on hazy scenes as one common degradation source, which whitens the view due to certain atmospheric conditions. Unlike typical computer vision systems that process recorded images, we aim to realize a see-through glasses system that can optically manipulate our field of view to dehaze the perceived scene. Our system selectively modulates the intensity of the light entering the eyes via occlusion-capable optical see-through head-mounted displays (OST-HMD). We built a proof-of-concept system to evaluate the feasibility of our haze removal method by combining a digital micromirror device (DMD) and an OST-HMD, and tested it with a user-perspective viewpoint camera. A quantitative evaluation with 80 scenes from a haze removal dataset shows that our system realizes a dehazed view that is significantly closer to the ground truth scene compared to the native view under a perceptual image similarity metric. This evaluation shows that our system achieves perceptually natural haze removal while maintaining the see-through view of actual scenes.