IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS FOR VIDEO TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 27, NO.
12, DECEMBER 2017 2505
Two-Layer Gaussian Process Regression With
Example Selection for Image Dehazing
Xin Fan, Member, IEEE, Yi Wang, Xianxuan Tang, Renjie Gao, and Zhongxuan Luo
Abstract— Researchers have devoted great efforts to image
dehazing with prior assumptions in the past decade. Recently
developed example-based approaches typically lack elegant mod-
els for the hazy process and meanwhile demand synthetic
hazy images by manual selection. The priors from observa-
tions, and those trained from synthetic images cannot always
reflect true structural information of natural images in practice.
In this paper, we present a learning model for haze removal
by using two-layer Gaussian process regression (GPR). By
using training examples, the two-layer GPR establishes a direct
relationship from the input image to the depth-dependent trans-
mission, and learns local image priors to further improve the
estimation. We also provide a systematic scheme to automatically
collect suitable training pairs, which works for both simu-
lated examples and images of natural scenes. Both qualitative
and quantitative comparisons on real-world and synthetic hazy
images demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach,
especially for white or bright objects and heavy haze regions in
which traditional methods may fail.
Index Terms— Example selection, Gaussian process regres-
sion (GPR), image dehazing.
I. I NTRODUCTION
H AZE is a common phenomenon caused by small droplets
or particles suspended in the atmosphere. The images
of outdoor scenes are often degraded by haze, showing low
visibility and contrast. These degraded images create diffi-
culties to both human perception and automatic computer
vision systems. Researches have invested significant efforts in
haze removal (dehazing) to restore images with high quality
and visibility [1], [2]. We address this issue from a learning
perspective that trains regressors on both imaging models and
image priors from automatically selected examples for image
dehazing, and show that better results can be obtained by using
the proposed approach.
Manuscript received November 19, 2015; revised May 23, 2016; accepted
July 9, 2016. Date of publication July 18, 2016; date of current version
December 13, 2017. This work was supported by the Natural Science Founda-
tion of China under Grant 61572096, Grant 61402072, and Grant 61328206.
This paper was recommended by Associate Editor P. Yin.
X. Fan, Y. Wang, and X. Tang are with the School of Software, Dalian
University of Technology, Dalian 116024, China, and also with the Key Lab-
oratory for Ubiquitous Network and Service Software of Liaoning Province,
Dalian 116621, China.
R. Gao is with the School of Software, Dalian University of Technology,
Dalian 116024, China.
Z. Luo is with the School of Software, Dalian University of Technology,
Dalian 116024, China, with the Key Laboratory for Ubiquitous Network
and Service Software of Liaoning Province, Dalian 116621, China, and also
with the School of Mathematical Sciences, Dalian University of Technology,
Dalian 116024, China.
This paper has supplementary downloadable material available at
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org., provided by the author.
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TCSVT.2016.2592328
1051-8215 © 2016 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
The dehazing algorithms that use only a single image
have attracted great attention in the past decade. Typically,
these methods employ strong image priors for the recovery.
Tan [3] assumes that the haze scenes are of high smoothness
and consistency, except for depth boundaries, and restores
color contrasts by maximizing the local contrast difference.
The results are visually compelling but may be oversatu-
rated in some local regions. Fattal [1] divides the scene
into foreground objects and background shading under the
assumption that the transmission is independent of surface
shading. The method lacks a global physical model for haze
formation and tends to underestimate the haze concentration,
especially on relatively thicker haze. He et al. [2] propose
the dark channel prior (DCP) that the minimum of RGB
channels for a local patch is close to zero without haze.
Therefore, the local minimum can be used to estimate the
transmission. The calculation of DCP is simple yet effective,
which gains great success for haze removal. Many variants of
DCP exist to improve the performance from various aspects.
Tarel and Hautière [4] and Gibson et al. [5] replace the
minimum operator with the median. Lai et al. [6] derive
the optimal transmission map from the haze model under
two scene priors. In our previous work, we [7] propose a
transmission model derived from DCP that is able to edit the
amount of haze in an image. However, the DCP assumption
does not hold on sky and bright white regions that are quite
common in outdoor scenes. Significant distortions inevitably
appear in these scenarios.
This a priori knowledge for either transmission or images
is built upon the field knowledge of the designers on haze
observations but is not necessarily true for general images.
Recently, data-driven approaches are prevailing in low-level
image restoration, including denoising and super-resolution.
In the context of image super-resolution, Huang and Wu [8]
use local linear regressions to learn the relationship between
the images of high resolution and low resolution. Similarly,
He and Siu [9] apply the Gaussian process regression (GPR)
to find the relationships. These direct regressions for the
formation models can render efficient image restoration.
Nevertheless, these data driven approaches are not so popular
in image dehazing, partially owing to the depth-dependent
degradation process for dehazing instead of traditional con-
volution for image restoration. Tang et al. [10] focus on
the feature selection for example-based dehazing, apply a
straightforward random forest, and reported high accuracy for
classification tasks to learn a mapping from the feature to
transmission. Zhu et al. [11] employ a linear model to learn the
scene depth for transmission estimation. These works directly
2506 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS FOR VIDEO TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 27, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2017
Fig. 1. Overview of our method. Based on the training images selected by the two-step screening process, the two-layer GPR is trained to remove haze
from a single hazy image.
bring regression models from the machine learning commu-
nity, neglecting the structural consistency between neighboring
transmissions for natural scenes. An elegant trainable model
for this depth-dependent degradation is still highly demanded.
In addition to a model characterizing the depth-dependent
degradation, it is also crucial and sometimes labor intensive
to find suitable examples to train the model. Tang et al. [10]
synthesize hazy images from haze-free images and use the
synthetic data as the training data for the dehazing model.
However, it is not suitable for thick haze, since it may
boost noise as the previous work. Gibson et al. [12] apply
patch candidates with a color-dependent transformation in the
example-based learning. This method is designed based on
3D simulation scenes, which are quite different from real-
world images. Similar to those in Tang et al.’s method [10],
it is questionable to apply the model trained from these
synthetic examples to real-world images. In [10]–[12], syn-
thetic hazy images from depth maps are manually chosen for
training. However, manually choosing appropriate examples
requires the expertise both on machine learning and low-level
dehazing processing.
In this paper, we apply a criterion against low-level image
features to pick suitable training examples either synthetic or
real world for dehazing, and train straightforward yet effective
classifiers for two-step example screening. We generate the
training pairs on selected images using the natural transmission
model [7]. Moreover, we propose a two-layer GPR model
trainable from the selected examples. One layer of GPR is
to build the regression between the transmission from rich
features on superpixels [13], including color [10], DCP [2],
and structural information [14]. The other layer learns the
priors on local structures for the predicted transmissions.
We combine the two transmission distributions of the two
GPR layers by their product as the prediction distribution,
and take the mean weighted by the prediction variances of
the two GPR layers as the transmission estimate. The physical
formation and local image priors are learned from examples
in a unified GPR framework. GPR not only implicitly encodes
the smoothness as the priors of Markov random fields (MRFs)
in [3], [15], and [16], but also explicitly bridges transmission
and observations. These direct connects circumvent iterative
inference, such as belief propagation for MRFs, and yield effi-
cient estimation. Through the two-step screening process, good
training data can be selected automatically. The combination of
the two layers of GPRs further improves the proposed method
and achieves higher accuracy. In a summary, the contributions
of this paper are twofold.
1) We propose a two-layer GPR model to learn depth-
dependent transmission from examples for image dehaz-
ing. This model forms a pairwise MRF, and enables
more accurate transmission estimation attenuating ring-
ing artifacts while preserving local details.
2) We provide a systematic scheme to pick suitable train-
ing examples from either synthetic or real-world hazy
images, rendering flexible and easygoing training for the
two-layer model.
The overview of our method is shown in Fig. 1, and the
hazy images are screened for training the GPR model. The
input of the trained GPR is the multiscale feature vector of
the image. The output is the corresponding transmission map
of the image. Then, the haze-free image can be recovered by
the haze image formation model. The selection of the training
examples is described in Section III, and the two-layer GPR
model is described in Section IV. Section V provides the
comprehensive experimental validations both qualitatively and
quantitatively, and Section VI concludes this paper.
II. BACKGROUND
In this section, we describe the haze image formation model
and GPR, and provide an overview of the proposed algorithm,
which all lay the background of our approach.
FAN et al.: TWO-LAYER GPR WITH EXAMPLE SELECTION FOR IMAGE DEHAZING
A. Haze Image Formation Model
We employ the formation model for a hazy image widely
accepted in computer vision and computer graphics [1], [2]
I ( pi ) = J ( pi )t ( pi ) + A(1 − t ( pi )) (1)
where I ( pi ) is the observed hazy image at a pixel pi , J ( pi ) is
the haze-free scene, A is the atmospheric light, and t ( pi ) is
the medium transmission, representing the portion of the light
that reaches the camera with a scalar value (0 ∼ 1). The
relationship between transmission t ( pi ) and depth d( pi ) can
be expressed as
t ( pi ) = e−βd( pi ) (2)
where β is the scattering coefficient of the haze.
We take the modified transmission model [7] that preserves
the aerial perspective to reformulate the transmission esti-
mation. The modified transmission t j ( pi ) to be estimated is
derived as
t j ( pi ) = ti ( pi )1−Dvisi /Dvis j (3)
where ti ( pi ) is the original estimated transmission. Dvisi and
Dvis j are the values of the maximum visibility for the input
and modified ones, respectively. The maximum visibility is
the maximum distance from which we can distinguish the
objects from the background in an image. We can generate
transmissions and corresponding images with various amounts
of haze by tuning the ratio of Dvisi and Dvis j .
B. Gaussian Process Regression
GPs map multivariate normal distributions to infinite dimen-
sionality [17], [18]. The observation y of the target variable
can be expressed as a weighted summation on the basis
function φ(x) of the input x with additive noise
y = wT φ(x) + n . (4)
The distribution on the observation assumes that weights and
noise behave according to a Gaussian distribution, p(w) =
N(0, αI) and p(n ) = N(0, σn2 ), and α and σn2 are the two
hyperparameters determining the distributions of weights w
and observation noise n . These two parameters can be esti-
mated by training examples. The covariance matrix of the
marginal distribution for N observations p(y) is determined
by the N × N Gram matrix G N with the elements
G(xn , xm ) = k(xn , xm ) + σn2 δ(xn , xm ) (5)
where δ(·) is the Kronecker delta function, and k(·) is a kernel
function that relates one input vector xn to another xm . We take
the squared exponential as the kernel function expressed as
 
−(xn − xm )2
2
k(xn , xm ) = σ f exp (6)
2l 2
where σ 2f is the scaling parameter, and l is the length
parameter. The training of these hyperparameters can be found
in [18].
GPR provides the distribution of the prediction y ∗ from
a new input x∗ , given N inputs X N = (x1 , . . . , x N ) and
2507
their corresponding observations Y N = (y1 , . . . , y N )T . The
conditional probability p(y ∗ | y N ) is Gaussian with the mean
m(x∗ ) and variance σ 2 (x∗ )
p(y ∗ |y N ) ∼ N (m(x∗ ), σ 2 (x∗ )) (7)
where
m(x∗ ) = kT G−1
N yN (8)
and
σ 2 (x∗ ) = k(x∗ , x∗ ) + σn2 − kT G−1
N k. (9)
The N-dimensional vector k is a function of the new input x∗
as k = [k(x1, x∗ ), . . . , k(x N , x∗ )]T . Hence, this predictive
distribution of the target variable gives a Gaussian probability
dependent on the input variable x∗ , outputting the mean and
the variance for the prediction.
GPR allows nonlinear mappings from the input to the target,
and meanwhile applies the smoothness for neighboring inputs
via the Gaussian assumption on w. We leverage GPR to build
both nonlinear mappings from input features to the transmis-
sion and incorporate the smoothness of local transmissions.
III. S CREENING T RAINING E XAMPLES FOR
G AUSSIAN P ROCESS R EGRESSION
In this section, we present the process to collect the training
examples for the two-layer GPR. Training data are always
important for regressions [19]. Unfortunately, the studies on
the selection of training examples are quite rare in the lit-
erature, especially for our case in which no accurate ground
truth for transmission is available [20]. Empirical analysis on
the previous dehazing methods built upon the transmission
model (1) shows that it is difficult to obtain the relationship
between the image observation and the transmission when the
images have a too high or too low concentration of haze. This
analysis implies that we have to select the images with the
appropriate concentration of haze, and an image that is suitable
for training should meet two criteria: 1) the image should have
haze and 2) the haze in the image should be in a range of
certain concentration. Accordingly, we define two quantities,
i.e., h-value and t-value, and develop a two-step screening
process to screen training images as follows.
A. Screening Images With h-Value
To pick out hazy images, we need to be able to detect haze
in the image first. Fattal [1] proposes a haze detection method,
which uses the hue disparity between the initial image and its
semi-inverse image to detect and estimate the hazy regions in
the image. The semi-inverse image is defined as
c
Isemi ( pi ) = max [I c ( pi ), 255 − I c ( pi )] (10)
pi ∈I |c∈{r,g,b}
where I is the initial image, and pi is the pixel in I . The
hue disparity of each pixel can be obtained by computing the
difference between the initial image and its semi-inverse image
 
h( pi ) =  I h ( pi ) − Isemi
h
( p i ) (11)
2508 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS FOR VIDEO TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 27, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2017
Fig. 2. Screening results of the first step. Top: haze-free images in which a
small portion of haze at the distance appears due to the aerial perspective [2].
Bottom: hazy images.
where h indicates the hue channel of the image. Hue disparity
values are normalized by dividing it by 255, and give the
distribution of the haze in the image. It has been observed
that the pixels in sky or hazy areas have high intensity values
in three color channels, which cause little change between
I and Isemi . On the other hand, the pixels in the haze-free part
will have high hue disparity values. Therefore, we can define
a threshold, and label the pixel that has a hue disparity value
below the threshold as a hazy pixel.
To investigate the overall distribution of haze in the image
more precisely, we define two features related to the hue
disparity, which are He and Hr . We define He as
1 
He = h( pi ) (12)
M We develop two features, Te and Tr , upon the rough
pi ∈I
where M is the number of pixels in I , and h( pi ) is the hue
disparity value of the pixel pi . The feature can be used to
represent the mean concentration of the haze in the image.
We use Hr to represent the ratio of hazy pixels, defined as
1 
Hr = r (h( pi )) (13)
M
pi ∈I
where r (h( pi )) is defined as
 Tr =
1, h( pi ) ∈ [0, th ]
r (h( pi )) = (14)
0, otherwise
where th is a predefined threshold. Since the pixels that have
hue disparity values below the threshold th are hazy pixels, this
feature represents the ratio of the hazy pixels to the total. We
can then show the overall distribution of the haze in the image,
and apply support vector machines (SVM) [21] to separate
the hazy images from other images based on the two features,
since they are effective, and SVM performs quite well on this
type classification problem. Fig. 2 shows the screening results
of the first step. We can see that the images can be classified
accurately and hazy images can be identified.
B. Screening Images With t-Value
When the concentration of the haze in the image is too high,
the image is also not suitable for training. Hence, we need to
exclude these images when we prepare training data. We use
the DCP [2] to roughly estimate the transmission of the image
for evaluating the haze concentration.
Assuming that the rough transmission of the pixels in a
local patch is a constant, we denote it by t˜( pi ). Taking the
Fig. 3. Screening results of the second step. Top: images with dense haze.
Bottom: images with suitable concentration of haze.
minimum value of the pixels in the patch on both sides of (1),
we have
I dark ( pi ) J dark ( pi ) ∗ t˜( pi )
= + 1 − t˜( pi ) (15)
Ac Ac
where Ac is the atmospheric light among three color channels,
and the superscript dark indicates the dark channel. As the
dark channel of a haze-free image is close to 0, J dark ≈ 0, the
rough transmission of the local patch is given by
I dark ( pi )
t˜( pi ) = 1 − . (16)
Ac
This transmission t˜ distribution map is able to approximate
the amount of haze in the image.
transmission to represent the overall concentration of haze in
the image. We define Te as
1 
Te = t˜( pi ) (17)
M
pi ∈I
where M is the number of the pixels in I . Te is the average
transmission of the image, representing the global concentra-
tion of the haze in the image. The other feature Tr is defined as
1 
r (t˜( pi )) (18)
M
pi ∈I
where r (t ( pi )) is defined as

1, t˜( pi ) ∈ [tl , 1]
r (t ( pi )) = (19)
0, otherwise
where tl is a predefined threshold. The pixel with the rough
transmission below tl has a high concentration of haze. Tr rep-
resents the proportion of the pixels with transmission above tl
and provides the ratio of regions with suitable concentration of
haze in the image. Again, we use SVM to classify the images
with the two features as the input. As shown in Fig. 3, this
process can accurately identify dense hazy images from the
others. Subsequently, the images with suitable concentration
(not dense) of haze are chosen as training examples.
It is difficult to choose the existing dehazing method to
generate the target transmission maps for the train images,
since not a single dehazing method achieves the best dehazing
results for all hazy images. We found that Fattal’s method [1],
He et al.’s method [2], and Tang et al.’s method [10] suffice
to produce target transmission maps for images with different
levels of haze. He et al.’s method works better for relatively
dense hazy images than Tang et al.’s method, though color
FAN et al.: TWO-LAYER GPR WITH EXAMPLE SELECTION FOR IMAGE DEHAZING
Fig. 4. Training images. Top: hazy images. Bottom: dehazed results.
distortions may appear in sky regions. Tang et al.’s dehazing
results have higher visual quality and fewer color distortions,
especially for moderate hazy images. Fattal’s method tends to
underestimate the haze, but it preserves the structure of the
image well for thin hazy images. We pick out hazy images
by the proposed screening, and categorize these hazy images
into different levels of haze as the byproduct of screening
classifiers. Subsequently, we apply these three dehazing meth-
ods respective to the haze level of an image in order to
generate corresponding transmission map for the image. These
haze/transmission pairs constitute the training examples for the
proposed two-layer model. We list some of the hazy images
with different levels of haze and their corresponding dehazed
outputs for training, as shown in Fig. 4.
IV. T WO -L AYER G AUSSIAN P ROCESS
R EGRESSION FOR D EHAZING
In this section, we briefly describe the oversegmentation for
superpixels and the multiscale feature vectors on superpixels,
generating the inputs of our model. Subsequently, we detail
the two-layer GPR model for dehazing and the subsequent
processing of transmissions for the haze removal.
A. Superpixel
We employ the superpixel in [13] to assemble the feature
vectors. The superpixels are obtained by using the following
features:
1) inter-region texture similarity;
2) intra-region texture similarity;
3) inter-region brightness similarity;
4) intra-region brightness similarity;
5) inter-region contour energy;
6) intra-region contour energy;
7) curvilinear continuity.
This combination of features segments superpixels well. The
pixels in a superpixel present homogenous texture, brightness,
and color. The use of these midlevel features, other than
image patches, renders a lower dimensional input space that
favors smaller training examples and simpler regressors, and
meanwhile partially provides structural contexts. The detailed
discussions about superpixels and local patches for dehazing
can be found in [22].
B. Multiscale Feature Vector
The ability to incorporate multiscale features is one of
the advantages of regression methods. The features for our
2509
GPR training include the hue, multiscale dark channel, local
maximum contrast, saturation, and Gabor features [10], [14].
Hue disparity can be used to detect haze [23]. In this paper,
we use the hue disparity between the hazy image and its semi-
inverse image as the feature for our training. The multiscale
dark channel, local maximum contrast, and saturation can be
expressed as
D s ( pi ) = min (min(I c ( ps ))) (20)
ps ∈s ( pi ) c∈{r,g,b}

(min ps ∈s ( pi ) (minc∈{r,g,b} (I c ( ps ))))2
C ( pi ) =
s
1−
(max ps ∈s ( pi ) (maxc∈{r,g,b} (I c ( ps ))))2
(21)
s (min ps ∈s ( pi ) (minc∈{r,g,b} (I c ( ps ))))
S ( pi ) = 1 − (22)
(max ps ∈s ( pi ) (maxc∈{r,g,b} (I c ( ps ))))
where D s is the dark channel, C s is the local maximum
contrast, and S s is the saturation. I c denotes the color RGB
channels of the input hazy image I . s is a local window
centered at the pixel pi with size s × s, where pi denotes
a pixel in the image I . A small s leads to an overdehazing
result, and on the contrary, a large s results in a large amount of
haze and halo effects near depth edges. Thus, we apply a mul-
tiscale s into dark channel features. In this paper, we use four
scales as D̃ = [D 1 , D 4 , D 7 , D 10 ], C̃ = [C 1 , C 4 , C 7 , C 10 ],
and S̃ = [S 1 , S 4 , S 7 , S 10 ].
Gabor filtering performs well in the field of textural repre-
sentation and classification, and textural features in an image
can be apparently changed by haze. We convolve a given
image with Gabor filter and calculate the Gabor features [14]
from the filtered image. Then, we apply Gabor features to
extend the information content of the feature vectors. Different
scales and orientations represent different image information.
We use Gabor features with three scales and eight directions
in our experiment. More details can be found in [14].
C. Two-Layer Gaussian Process Regression
We build a two-layer GPR model for learning transmissions
on superpixels. As shown in Fig. 5, the first GPR layer takes
multiscale feature vectors as the input, and find the conditional
probability of transmission dependent on the input features
from training examples. Center pixels can be represented by
the neighboring pixels or a subset of the connected neigh-
boring pixels [25]. The second GPR relates the transmission
of the current superpixel with those of neighboring superpix-
els. These two layers form an MRF, where the conditional
probability densities are Gaussian with the mean and variance
determined by training examples. Hence, the inference of
transmissions for superpixels is quite straightforward, which
we detail in the following.
1) Gaussian Process Regression From Feature to
Transmission: We use the average feature vector within
the superpixel of interest as the input fs of the first GPR layer
1 
fs = F( pi ) (23)
|n|
pi ∈Si
F( pi ) = [H, D̃, C̃, S̃, G f 3,8 ] (24)
2510 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS FOR VIDEO TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 27, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2017
Fig. 5. Two-layer GPR model of transmissions for dehazing. The first layer
GPR1 learns the mapping from the midlevel features to transmission, and
the second layer GPR2 provides the relationship of transmissions between
neighboring superpixels.
where Si is the superpixel, n is the number of pixels in Si , and
F( pi ) is the multiscale feature extracted at the pixel pi . The
feature vector includes H , D̃, C̃, S̃, and G f 3,8 , representing
the hue, DCP with four scales, contrast with four scales,
saturation with four scales, and Gabor features with three
scales and eight orientations, respectively, as described in
Section IV-B. The recent work [10] constructs a 325D feature
vector at every pixel in a 5 × 5 patch. We take the average
of the pixel feature vectors within a superpixel where these
vectors share similar characteristics. Finally, we have a 37D
feature vector for each superpixel, significantly decreasing the
regression complexity.
We take the transmission t at a superpixel as the target
variable y for the first layer. However, it is nontrivial to collect
the target transmission values for training the GP regres-
sor from real-world hazy images, as these values are not
directly available from observations. We apply three dehazing
methods [1], [2], [10] to the training images, and use the trans-
mission map that produces the best restoration as the target
map. We then take the feature vector at every superpixel as
the input x and the corresponding transmission as the target y
to train the parameters of the GP regressor in (5) and (6).
We are able to have the conditional probability of the trans-
mission prediction t ∗f , given any new input feature vector fs∗ ,
when N training transmissions t f and their corresponding
inputs are available. As shown in (7), the conditional prob-
ability is a Gaussian distribution
     These conditional dependences are given by Gaussian proba-
p t ∗f fs∗ ∼ N m fs∗ , σ 2 fs∗ . (25)
We explicitly introduce the input vector fs∗ , on which the mean
and the variance depend, into the notation of the conditional
probability, and omit the training observations y N in the
probability of (7), as this term is fixed for a given training
set. We substitute the feature vector fs∗ in (23) as x∗ to (8)
and (9), and take the mean m(fs∗ ) and the variance σ 2 (fs∗ ) as
the transmission estimation and its error predicted from the
observed feature at every superpixel.
The predicted transmission of the first GPR layer is able to
roughly reflect the depth and global structures of an image,
as shown in Fig. 6(b), but it presents local disparity and the
superpixel lack of interactions with its neighbors.
2) Gaussian Process Regression on Neighboring
Transmissions: We use the second GPR layer to smooth the
local discrepancies among predicted transmissions. These
discrepancies destroy the consistency of image structures, and
may lead to unnatural estimation in local regions. This GPR
layer plays a similar role to the connections between latent
variables of the MRFs in [15] and [16], but needs no iterative
energy optimization or inference process. We can achieve the
smoothing by a one-step prediction.
The target is the transmission t (Si ) at a superpixel Si , and
the collection of the training transmissions is also the same
as that for the first layer. We train the second GP regressor
by using every transmission of training images as the target y
and their nearest eight neighbors as the input vector tn
tn = [t (S1 ), . . . , t (S j ), . . . , t (S8 )] S j ∈Ne (Si ) . (26)
It should be noted that a superpixel does not necessarily
have a fixed number of positional adjacent neighbors as a
pixel does. Thus, we take the eight nearest neighbors, not
necessarily sharing a boundary with (nor being adjacent to) the
current superpixel, to generate input vectors with an identical
dimension for the regressor.
In the prediction stage, we concatenate the transmissions t ∗f
predicted in the first layer of the nearest eight neighbors as
the new input tn∗ = [t ∗f (S1 ), . . . , t ∗f (S j ), . . . , t ∗f (S8 )] S j ∈Ne (Si )
for the layer. Similarly, we obtain a Gaussian probability
for the predicted transmission t ∗ dependent on that of its
neighbors tn∗ as
    
p t ∗ tn∗ ∼ N m tn∗ , σ 2 tn∗ . (27)
Again, the mean estimation and variance can be calcu-
lated by substituting the neighboring input transmissions
to (8) and (9). As shown in Fig. 6(c), this transmission
prediction of a superpixel from its neighbors shows global
smoothness and consistency.
3) Transmission Estimation With the Two-Layer GPR: The
two-layer model in Fig. 5 for transmissions at superpixels
forms an MRF similar to [15] and [16]. In the spirit of classical
belief propagation inference on MRF [15], [26], the marginal
probability of a node in MRF, herein the transmission at a
superpixel, is proportional to the product of messages reflect-
ing the conditional dependences on adjoining nodes or factors
(observed features and neighboring transmissions in Fig. 5).
bility density functions, as shown in (25) and (27). Therefore,
we have the transmission estimation
     
p(t ∗ ) ∝ N m tn∗ , σ 2 tn∗ N m fs∗ , σ 2 fs∗ . (28)
FAN et al.: TWO-LAYER GPR WITH EXAMPLE SELECTION FOR IMAGE DEHAZING
Fig. 6. Haze removal with two-layer GPR. (a) Hazy image. (b) Transmission image estimated by the first layer GPR. (c) Transmission image estimated by
the second-layer GPR. (d) Refined transmission image estimated by the combination of the two-layer GPR. (e) Final transmission image improved by guided
filtering [24] and Gaussian filtering. (f) Our final haze removal result. (g) Original haze-free image.
The distribution of the first layer N (m(fs∗ ), σ 2 (fs∗ )) indicates
the conditional dependence on the observed feature of the
current superpixel, while the second one N (m(tn∗ ), σ 2 (tn∗ ))
characterizes the interaction of the transmissions between the
current superpixel and its neighboring ones.
The distribution of p(t ∗ ) in (28) is a scaled Gaussian
distribution
p(t ∗ ) ∼ N (m(t ∗ ), σ 2 (t ∗ )) (29)
and the mean and the variance of p(t ∗ ) are given
as [27], [28]
    in our proposed model significantly reduces the complexity.
∗ m tn∗ σ 2 fs∗ + m fs∗ σ 2 tn∗
m(t ) =   (30)
σ 2 fs∗ + σ 2 tn∗
and
  respectively.
∗ σ 2 fs∗ σ 2 tn∗
σ (t ) = 2  ∗
2  . (31)
σ fs + σ 2 tn∗
Our two-layer model is not simply substituting the feature
vector at the current superpixel in (24) with an augmented
one by the features of eight surrounding superpixels, though
the transmission estimation on our model is merged into
one Gaussian in (29). The underlying assumption of using
the augmented feature vector in (24) is the independence
between any transmissions, given the features of the current
superpixel and its neighbors. This independent assumption
would neglect the interactions between neighboring transmis-
sions, e.g., structural consistency of neighboring transmissions.
In contrast, the second GPR layer in our model encodes these
interactions.
Equation (30) shows that the final estimation m(t ∗ ) of
the transmission at a superpixel is a linear combination
of the predicted estimates from the two layers, weighted
by their prediction variances. This two-layer model takes
the advantage of the GP regression whereby the prediction
uncertainty is provided in terms of the prediction variance.
The final transmission relies more on the prediction of a GPR
layer with the lower variance giving a more accurate estimate.
Consequently, the transmission estimation of the two-layer
combination, as shown in Fig. 6(d), attenuates ringing effects
appearing in the output of the first GPR layer [Fig. 6(b)],
and meanwhile preserves more details than the transmission
map generated by the second layer [Fig. 6(c)]. It is also
worth noting from (31) that the variance σ 2 (t ∗ ) is smaller
than that of the prediction from either layer. This decreased
2511
variance indicates that the transmission estimate from the
two-layer model yields the accuracy improvements for
transmission estimation. The quantitative analysis is in
Section V-A.
Alternatively, it is possible to jointly train one GP regression
from the 333D (37 × 9) augmented feature space to the
9D transmission space (one center superpixel and its eight
neighbors), generating an R333×9 mapping. It is known that
the training complexity of GPR is exponential to the mapping
dimensionality. The decomposition into two simpler GPR
mappings (one maps 37D to 1D, and one from 8D to 1D)
Moreover, both layers of GPR have clear interpolations:
one relating the feature to transmission and the other
encoding the interactions between neighboring transmissions,
The transmission output is superpixelwise. For a further
refinement, the guided filtering [24] is applied to obtain the
final transmission [Fig. 6(e)]. The guided filter is simple and
effective, producing good results in less time compared with
the soft matting in [2].
D. Subsequent Processing for Haze Removal
We complete the major work for haze removal once we
obtain the transmission, except for the unknown atmosphere
light A. In [7], A is considered as the value of input image
corresponding to the top 0.1% brightest pixels of dark channel
with corrections due to the multiple scattering effect [29].
In this paper, we select the value of an input image corre-
sponding to the top 0.1% darkest pixels of transmission as A,
because our estimation is more precise than the simple dark
channel. Meanwhile, the correction method is kept
A∗ = (1 − η)A (32)
where η is a correction parameter, which is commonly chosen
as 0.02, 0.01, or 0.
For the sky region, we use the compensation in [7]
ti ( pi ) = 2tα − ti ( pi ) (33)
where tα is the transmission boundary of the sky and the
scenery.
Finally, we manually set Dvis j and Dvisi with
Dvis j  Dvisi to remove haze, and as shown in Fig. 6(f), the
restored image is almost the same as the original [Fig. 6(g)].
2512 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS FOR VIDEO TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 27, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2017
Fig. 7. Variance distributions of the first (feature to transmission), second
(neighbor to transmission), and two-layer GPR.
V. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS AND A NALYSIS
In this section, we first validate the use of the two-layer
GPR model over one layer ones by comparing their estimation
variances. Second, we show our experimental results and com-
parisons with the dehazing existing methods [2], [10], [11],
and perform both qualitative and quantitative comparisons on
synthetic and real-world hazy images. Finally, we use different
groups of training examples to train the regressor in order
to show the effectiveness of the proposed screening process.
In the experiment, we use ten images as the training set.1
A. Transmission Variance Comparisons
The transmission estimates from the first (feature to trans-
mission), second (neighbor to transmission), and two-layer
models are given by (25), (27), and (28), respectively.
As shown in Fig. 6(d), the transmission map estimated from
the two-layer model combines the details predicted from the
first layer [Fig. 6(b)] and the smoothness from the second
one [Fig. 6(c)], showing the merits of the weighted mean esti-
mation (30) for the two-layer model. Herein, we compare the
variances of these estimates to experimentally validate (31).
We take 660 superpixels of four hazy images for analysis, and
obtain three groups of the 660 transmission variances at these
superpixels from the first, second, and two-layer models. The
normalized (by 660) distributions or histograms of the three
variances are shown in Fig. 7. The y-axis shows the fraction of
the variance values that fall within the bins of the x-axis. We
can see that most of transmission variances of the two-layer
model are smaller than those variances of the first and second
ones. Over 25% of variances from the two-layer model are
smaller than 0.01, while about 10% from the first and second
ones fall within this range. We also take the mean of the three
groups of variances for four hazy images, as shown in Table I.
The mean value of the variances for 660 superpixels of the
second layer is higher than the first one, as the prediction
from the second layer is given upon the output of the first
one, having more uncertainties. In addition, the prediction
from features might be more informative than the smoothness.
As expected, the mean value of the two-layer GPR model for
1 The source code and testing images can be
https://github.com/dlut-dimt/Two-Layer-GPR-Dehazing.
TABLE I
M EAN VARIANCES (×10−6 ) FOR F OUR H AZY I MAGES
every image is always the lowest among the three. Both Fig. 7
and Table I show that the two-layer GPR model is able to
generate more accurate transmission estimation, upon which
high-quality dehazing images can be restored. In the following
experiments, we present the dehazing performance of the two-
layer GPR for the comparisons with the existing dehazing
methods.
B. Comparisons With Other Haze Removal Methods
Our comparisons begin with the experiments on synthetic
hazy images in which the ground truth haze-free images are
available. Original images and their corresponding depth maps
are used to simulate haze images based on the work by
Saxena et al. [30]. We compare our haze removal results of
these synthetic images with the existing methods. Fig. 8 shows
the haze-free images, the simulated hazy images, and the haze
removal results of different methods on the synthetic images.
In the comparisons, the work by He et al. [2] overestimates the
transmission; therefore, the whole image is dim. The results
also have color distortions and fail to deal with sunny and
white scenes. Tang et al.’s results [10] also produce color
distortions and generate dark images due to overdehazing
caused by inaccurate transmission estimation. Zhu et al. [11]
underestimate the haze. There is a large amount of haze that
remained in the image, as shown in the second row. By
contrast, our results have a few color distortions. The haze
removal results restore to the previous haze-free images ,
which are the best among the four methods. The original colors
of the buildings and the roads are well preserved. Compared
with the other methods, our results look the most natural.
We also collect real-world hazy images and remove the haze
from them with the existing methods in [2], [10], and [11].
Fig. 9 shows our results and the results of the other methods.
He et al.’s method generates dark images due to the overde-
hazing of DCP, and it fails on sky regions, as shown in the
third row of Fig. 9. Zhu et al.’s results have haze in the images.
Tang et al.’s results perform better than the two methods but
also have some degree of color distortions. He et al.’s and
Tanget al.’s methods tend to overestimate the thickness of
haze (or underestimate the transmission), which results in dim
scenes and different degrees of color distortions. By contrast,
our results have little color distortions and look more realistic.
The truck is clearer than the other results as shown in the
second row of Fig. 9. The global consistency and the details
are well preserved.
To evaluate the results in an objective way, we use two
metrics with reference for image quality assessment, i.e.,
the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) [31] and the structural
found at similarity (SSIM) [32]. We simulate 30 hazy images, and
employ the box plots to visualize the statistics of dehazing
FAN et al.: TWO-LAYER GPR WITH EXAMPLE SELECTION FOR IMAGE DEHAZING 2513

Fig. 8. Visual comparisons on synthetic hazy images. (a) Haze-free images. (b) Hazy images. (c) He et al.’s results [2]. (d) Tang et al.’s results [10].
(e) Zhu et al.’s results [11]. (f) Our results.

Fig. 9. Visual comparisons on real-world hazy images. From left to right: hazy images, He et al.’s results [2], Tang et al.’s results [10],
Zhu et al.’s results [11], and our results.

results evaluated by the two metrics. Fig. 10 shows the box
plots of SSIM and PSNR of different methods on the synthetic
images. The blue horizontal lines indicate the lower and upper
quartile values. The red horizontal lines in the box denote
the median values. The whiskers extending from two ends
of the boxes show the extent of the data falling out of the
quartile. The higher median values of PSNR and SSIM, the
results are closer to their corresponding haze-free images.
In the comparison of SSIM and PSNR, the median values
of He et al.’s results are lower than the other methods, as
2514 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS FOR VIDEO TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 27, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2017

Fig. 10. Box plot of quantitative comparisons on synthetic hazy images. (a) SSIM of different methods. (b) PSNR of different methods.

Fig. 11. Box plot of quantitative comparisons on real-world hazy images. (a) Blur metric of different methods. (b) BIQI of different methods.

a large portion of white regions appear in these images where
DCP does not work very well. By contrast, our results have
the highest median values of SSIM and PSNR among the four
methods.
For quantitative evaluation on haze removal results, we
use 18 real-world hazy images for experiments. It is still an
open issue to objectively evaluate the dehazing quality without
any reference [33]. We use two popular metrics, i.e., the blur
metric [34] and blind image quality indices (BIQI) [35] for
our comparison. Fig. 11 shows the box plots of the image
qualities on real-world hazy images. The blur metric evaluates
the image quality in terms of blur perception, and the blur
metric ranges from 0 to 1, indicating the best to the worst.
As shown in Fig. 11(a), the median value of Tang et al.’s and
Zhu et al.’s results is almost the same and is higher than the
another two methods, which means that their results have the
worst image quality from the blur aspect. These results can be
partially explained by the simulated training images used in
their regression. This discrepancy between training and testing
examples generates inaccurate transmission prediction for real-
world natural images. Our results have comparable median
value with those of the He et al.’s but show a significantly
smaller lower quartile value. We are able to produce quite
sharp images in some cases.
The BIQI metric computes blockness, blur, corner outliers,
and noise of an image, and combines them into a quality
score in order to evaluate the feature distortions. The quality
score has a value between 0 and 100. Lower values stand for
smaller distortions or higher quality. As shown in Fig. 11(b),
the median values of these methods have no significant gaps.
Among them, our results output the lowest median value
of BIQI, since the second GPR layer is able to smear structural
inconsistency. Fig. 11 shows that our method produces the
dehazed images of high quality under these two metrics.
However, it is still under investigation for the community to
devise a comprehensive metric, which reflects both sharpness
and structural information, for the evaluation of dehazing
algorithms. Though it is quite interesting, we have to leave this
comprehensive objective comparisons for future work that is
beyond the scope of this paper. To be more intuitive, we show
the mean values of SSIM, PSNR, blur, and BIQI of different
methods in Table II.
To make a subjective verification on visual effect, we also
make a perceptual comparison [33] with the existing methods
in [2], [10], and [11]. We establish a test database with
18 real-world hazy images and dehazed results of different
dehazing methods. We asked 22 young observers (12 males
and 10 females) to rate the resultant images of different
FAN et al.: TWO-LAYER GPR WITH EXAMPLE SELECTION FOR IMAGE DEHAZING
Fig. 12. Bar plots of the MOS values of different dehazing methods.
TABLE II
M EAN VALUES OF SSIM, PSNR, BLUR, AND BIQI OF
D IFFERENT M ETHODS
TABLE III
M EAN AND S TANDARD D EVIATION OF MOSs OF
D IFFERENT D EHAZING M ETHODS
dehazing methods with a value from 1 to 10. Higher values
indicate better perceptual quality. The dehazed results were
presented to the observers in a random order. Hazy images also
need to be scored as references. All these observers have no
background nor prior knowledge on dehazing algorithms. We
compute the mean opinion score (MOS) for all testing images
and compare the performance of dehazing methods in terms
of the mean and standard deviation (std) of the MOS values
for the outputs of these methods. The mean value provides
the overall MOS of a method, while the std value indicates
the stability of the method. Fig. 12 shows the bar plots of the
MOS of different dehazing methods, where the height of a bar
indicates that the mean and the height of the vertical line on
top of the bar denote the standard deviation. In addition, the
values of mean and standard deviation of the MOSs are shown
in Table III.
As shown in Fig. 12, observers have consensus on the qual-
ity improvements of all dehazing methods over hazy images.
Zhu et al.’s method relies on the atmospheric scattering model
that tends to underestimate the transmission for dense hazy
images, leading to the lowest mean MOS among the compared
methods. Tang et al.’s and He et al.’s methods share similar
mean scores, but He et al.’s method has a higher std value.
He et al.’s method based on DCP does not work well on some
images with large white or sky regions. Tang et al.’s method is
able to output more stable performance because of the learned
model from a variety of natural scenes. Our method produces
2515
TABLE IV
M EAN PSNR OF D IFFERENT G ROUPS OF T RAINING E XAMPLES
the highest mean value and the lowest std. The high and
stable performance can be explained, as the transmissions of
natural scenes are well characterized by our two-layer model.
Meanwhile, our screening process is able to find suitable
examples to train the model. Both the model and the screening
exhibit the consistency with observers’ perceptual assessments.
C. Training Examples With Various Haze Concentrations
In Section III, we develop a two-step screening process
to choose training images. We use this process to group the
images in the training image data set into three categories
according to the haze concentration: 1) images without haze;
2) images with dense haze; and 3) images with moderate
haze. We then use the images in these three groups to train
our two-layer GPR models, and generate dehazing results in
Fig. 13 with the trained model from different groups of training
examples. The GP regressors trained from images without haze
or dense haze underestimate the transmission, and there still
exists notable haze in the resultant images. In addition, the
sky regions also have color distortions. We can see that the
results from the training images with moderate haze perform
the best among the three groups. The restored results retain the
details of the images and have high brightness and contrast.
The scenes are also restored well. This shows the importance
of selecting suitable images for training and that our proposed
screening process works well. We also use the nonreference
blur metric [34] to perform the quantitative evaluation on
haze removal results of different training groups, as shown
in Fig. 14 where box plots are given.2 The three groups have
different degrees of blurring on the results, indicating that the
haze removal results are affected by training examples. Among
the three groups, training images without haze generate a
model that is poor for sharpening hazy images. The lower
median values on the blur metric from the second and third
groups show that the inclusion of hazy images is definitely able
to improve the ability of the learned model for prediction. This
validates the effectiveness of the first screening stage. More-
over, the performance can be further improved by filtering
out images with dense haze with the second screening. The
lowest median value and the upper quartile value verify the
effectiveness and stability of our screening process.
In our experiment, we also simulate hazy images with
different degrees of haze on haze-free images and use the
three groups of training examples above to remove haze from
synthetic hazy images. We group the simulated hazy image
into three categories: 1) images with thin haze; 2) images
with dense haze; and 3) images with moderate haze. Table IV
shows the mean value of PSNR of different groups of training
2 All the testing and resultant images for the comparisons in
Figs. 10, 11, and 14 are available in the Supplemental Materials.
2516 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS FOR VIDEO TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 27, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2017

Fig. 13. Comparisons among the different groups of training examples. From left to right: hazy images, haze removal results of the first group, haze removal
results of the second group, and haze removal results of the third group.

is expected to improve the efficiency of the training; 2) the

addition of other features may improve the precision of the
regression further; and 3) the regression framework can be
used to handle other related problems, like the underwater
scene [37] or night image [38] enhancement.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank Prof. M.-T. Sun at the
University of Washington for his valuable suggestions and
carefully proofreading this paper. They would also like to
thank Dr. J. Wang and Dr. J. Yang for providing the results of
their method [10] on all the synthetic and real-world images
in this paper.
Fig. 14. Box plot of blur metric comparisons among different groups of
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Xin Fan (M’06) was born in 1977. He received the
B.E. and Ph.D. degrees in information and commu-
nication engineering from Xi’an Jiaotong University,
Xi’an, China, in 1998 and 2004, respectively.
From 2006 to 2007, he was with Oklahoma State
University, Stillwater, OK, USA, as a Post-Doctoral
Research Fellow. In 2008, he was with the Univer-
sity of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas,
TX, USA, for the second post-doctoral training. He
joined the School of Software, Dalian University of
Technology (DUT), Dalian, China, in 2009, where
he is currently a Full Professor and Vice Dean of the School for Research.
He is also the Duty Dean of the DUT-RU International School of Information
and Science Technology, Dalian. His research interests include computational
geometry and machine learning, and their applications to low-level image
processing and DTI-MR image analysis.
Yi Wang received the B.E. and Ph.D. degrees in
computer science from Jilin University, Changchun,
China, in 2002 and 2009, respectively.
She has been a Lecturer with the School
of Software, Dalian University of Technology,
Dalian, China, since 2009. Her research interests
include machine learning, computer vision, and
virtual reality.
Xianxuan Tang was born in 1994. She received
the B.E. degree in software engineering from Dalian
Maritime University, Dalian, China, in 2014. She is
currently pursuing the master’s degree with Dalian
University of Technology, Dalian.
Her research interests include computer vision,
image processing, and machine learning.
Renjie Gao received the B.E. and M.S. degrees
in software engineering from Dalian University
of Technology, Dalian, China, in 2012 and 2015,
respectively.
He is currently with China Construction Bank,
Beijing, China. His research interests include com-
puter vision, image processing, and machine learn-
ing.
Zhongxuan Luo received the B.S. and M.S. degrees
from Jilin University, Changchun, China, in 1985
and 1988, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from
Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China, in
1991, all in computational mathematics.
Since 1997, he has been a Full Professor with the
School of Mathematical Sciences, Dalian University
of Technology, where he is currently the Dean of the
School of Software. His research interests include
computational geometry and computer vision.