Abstract:The atmosphere lighting difference in outdoor image would cause the dehazed outdoor image quality to occur the color deviation, image quality degradation and other issues. An image dehazing algorithm based on atmosphere lighting difference is proposed. The image is segmented into sky area and non-sky area. The sky area and non-sky area are further segmented according to atmosphere lighting difference. The contrast prior dehazing method is applied to the sky areas, while the dehazing approach based on dark channel is applied to dehaze the non-sky areas. The white balance adjustment algorithm is employed for slightly changing the brightness and color. Experiments demonstrate that the presented method is better than the conventional methods in color fidelity preservation, uniform illumination generation and image quality maintenance. The algorithm is robust, which makes the frog-free images bear more realistic and sharp detail, and accord to the human visual characteristics.