Improved Visibility of Road Scene Images under Heterogeneous Fog
Abstract
One source of accidents when driving a vehicle is the presence of homogeneous and heterogeneous fog.
Fog fades the colors and reduces the contrast of the observed objects with respect to their distances.
Various camera-based Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) can be improved if efficient algorithms are designed
for visibility enhancement of road images. The visibility enhancement algorithm proposed in [1] is not
dedicated to road images and thus it leads to limited quality results on images of this kind. In this paper, we interpret the
algorithm in [1] as the inference of the local atmospheric veil subject to two constraints. From this interpretation, we propose an extended algorithm which better handles road images by taking into account that a large part of the image can be
assumed to be a planar road. The advantages of the proposed local algorithm are its speed, the possibility to handle both color images or gray-level images, and its small number of parameters. A comparative study
and quantitative evaluation with other state-of-the-art algorithms is proposed on synthetic images with several types
of generated fog. This evaluation demonstrates that the new algorithm produces similar quality results with homogeneous fog and that it is able to better deal with the presence of heterogeneous fog.
Source code
The matlab source code of the algorithm is available. More on the algorithm is described here.
Reference
@inproceedings{jpt-iv10,
author = {Tarel, J.-P. and Hauti\`ere, N. and Cord, A. and Gruyer, D. and Halmaoui, H.},
title = {Improved Visibility of Road Scene Images under Heterogeneous Fog},
booktitle = {Proceedings of IEEE Intelligent Vehicle Symposium (IV'2010)},
date = {June 21-24},
address = {San Diego, California, USA},
year = {2010},
pages = {478-485},
note = {http://perso.lcpc.fr/tarel.jean-philippe/publis/iv10.html}
}
Pdf file (1838 Kb)
(c) IEEE