Optimising hazy image clarity through blue channel balancing in lab color space

Atmospheric haze often introduces a dominant bluish or yellowish color cast in images, degrading visibility and visual quality. Analysis of hazy image histograms reveals that this color shift is primarily driven by an imbalance in the blue channel, particularly in non-homogeneous haze and sky regions. To address this, we propose a novel Blue Channel Balancing method operating within the CIELAB color space. Our approach calculates the deviation of the B-channel mean from a neutral reference and adaptively corrects it using the normalized luminance (L-channel) as a weighting factor. This effectively mitigates the blue-yellow bias while preserving natural color fidelity. Experimental results on the O-HAZE dataset demonstrate that our method significantly improves image clarity and dehazing performance compared to traditional Dark Channel Prior (DCP) methods, particularly in medium-density haze scenarios. The proposed technique offers a computationally efficient solution for enhancing visibility in outdoor surveillance and autonomous driving applications.