A survey on visibility enhancement techniques in degraded atmospheric outdoor scenes

Often the images of outdoor scenes are drastically altered by the atmospheric particles and loses the contrast and gradient information. Accurate detection of image features from outdoor scenes requires clear visibility in computer vision applications. Currently, there has been an augmented attention in the communities of image processing towards enhancing the visibility of outdoor images acquired in specific atmospheric conditions (i.e. fog, haze, mist, etc.). The paper presents a significant methodological review on visibility enhancement techniques degraded by different weather conditions in outdoor environment. In this survey, we categorized the enhancement techniques on the basis of approaches they used to restore the visibility and provide comprehensive description of different methods in each category.