Abstract: Atmospheric conditions induced by suspended particles,such as fog and haze, severely alter the scene appearance.In this paper, we propose a novel defogging method basedon the local extrema, aiming at improving the image visibilityunder foggy or hazy weather condition. The proposed methodutilizes atmospheric scattering model to realize the fog removal.It applies the local extrema method to figure out three pyramidlevels to estimate atmospheric veil, and manipulates the toneand contrast of details at different scales through multi-scaletone manipulation algorithm. The results on the experimentsof comparison with traditional methods demonstrate that theproposed method can achieve more accurate restoration for thecolor and details, resulting in a great improvement in imagevisibility.

Keywords: Defog, local extrema, atmospheric scattering model, haze removal.