Volume 7 Issue 1 - May 2016

  • 1. Hazy image enhancement using visibility restoration technique

    Authors : Merlin Livingston

    Pages : 628-638

    DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.21172/1.71.090

    Keywords : Visibility restoration Depth estimation Hazy Image

    Abstract :

    The visibility of outdoor images captured in inclement weather is often degraded due to the presence of haze, fog, sandstorms, and so on. Poor visibility caused by atmospheric phenomena in turn causes failure in computer vision applications, such as outdoor object recognition systems, obstacle detection systems, video surveillance systems, and intelligent transportation systems. In order to solve this problem, visibility restoration (VR) techniques have been developed and play an important role in many computer vision applications that operate in various weather conditions. However, removing haze from a single image with a complex structure and color distortion is a difficult task for VR techniques. This paper proposes a novel VR method that uses a combination of three major modules:A depth estimation (DE) module ,A color analysis (CA) module,A visibility restoration VR module. The proposed depth estimation DE module takes advantage of the median filter technique and adopts this adaptive gamma correction technique. By doing so, halo effects can be avoided in images with complex structures, and effective transmission map estimation can be achieved. The proposed color analysis CA module is based on the gray world assumption and analyzes the color characteristics of the input hazy image.Subsequently, the visibility restoration VR module uses the adjusted transmission map and the color-correlated information to repair the color distortion in variable scenes captured during inclement weather conditions. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method provides superior haze removal in comparison with the previous method through qualitative and quantitative evaluations of different scenes captured during various weather conditions.

    Citing this Journal Article :

    Merlin Livingston, "Hazy image enhancement using visibility restoration technique", Volume 7 Issue 1 - May 2016, 628-638