I-HAZE: a Dehazing Benchmark with Real Hazy and Haze-free Indoor Images

Image dehazing has become an important computational imaging topic in the recent years. However, due to the lack of ground truth images, the comparison of dehazing methods is not straightfor- ward, nor objective. To overcome this issue we introduce I-HAZE, a new dataset that contains 35 image pairs of hazy and corresponding haze-free (ground-truth) indoor images. Different from most of the existing dehaz- ing databases, hazy images have been generated using real haze produced by a professional haze machine. To ease color calibration and improve the assessment of dehazing algorithms, each scene includes a MacBeth color checker. Moreover, since the images are captured in a controlled environment, both haze-free and hazy images are captured under the same illumination conditions. This represents an important advantage of the I-HAZE dataset that allows us to objectively compare the existing image dehazing techniques using traditional image quality metrics such as PSNR and SSIM.