Transmittance-Guided Structure-Texture Decomposition for Nighttime Image Dehazing

Abstract

Nighttime images captured under hazy conditions suffer from severe quality degradation, including low visibility, color distortion, and reduced contrast, caused by the combined effects of atmospheric scattering, absorption by suspended particles, and non-uniform illumination from artificial light sources. While existing nighttime dehazing methods have achieved partial success, they typically address only a subset of these issues, such as glow suppression or brightness enhancement, without jointly tackling the full spectrum of degradation factors. In this paper, we propose a two-stage nighttime image dehazing framework that integrates transmittance correction with structure-texture layered optimization. In the first stage, we introduce a novel transmittance correction method that establishes boundary-constrained initial transmittance maps and subsequently applies region-adaptive compensation and normalization based on whether image regions correspond to light source areas. A quadratic Gaussian filtering scheme operating in the YUV color space is employed to estimate the spatially varying atmospheric light map. The corrected transmittance map and atmospheric light map are then used in conjunction with an improved nighttime imaging model to produce the initial dehazed image. In the second stage, we propose a STAR-YUV decomposition model that separates the dehazed image into structure and texture layers within the YUV color space. Gamma correction and MSRCR-based color restoration are applied to the structure layer for illumination compensation and color bias correction, while Laplacian-of-Gaussian filtering is applied to the texture layer for detail enhancement. A novel two-phase fusion strategy, comprising nonlinear Retinex-based fusion of the enhanced layers followed by linear blending with the initial dehazing result, yields the final output.