Mitigation of atmospheric contrast degradation via image enhancement

Abstract

Images obtained in bad weather such as haze, fog may have low contrast, particularly towards the top of the image. The technical challenge is to reverse this process - provided with just the “foggy” scene, estimate the contribution due to optical scattering and so recover the original scene. This is possible for a general flat-field scene and a forward-looking camera, although there are some limitations due to noise effects.