184 research outputs found
Haze Visibility Enhancement: A Survey and Quantitative Benchmarking
This paper provides a comprehensive survey of methods dealing with visibility
enhancement of images taken in hazy or foggy scenes. The survey begins with
discussing the optical models of atmospheric scattering media and image
formation. This is followed by a survey of existing methods, which are grouped
to multiple image methods, polarizing filters based methods, methods with known
depth, and single-image methods. We also provide a benchmark of a number of
well known single-image methods, based on a recent dataset provided by Fattal
and our newly generated scattering media dataset that contains ground truth
images for quantitative evaluation. To our knowledge, this is the first
benchmark using numerical metrics to evaluate dehazing techniques. This
benchmark allows us to objectively compare the results of existing methods and
to better identify the strengths and limitations of each method
Dense Haze: A benchmark for image dehazing with dense-haze and haze-free images
Single image dehazing is an ill-posed problem that has recently drawn
important attention. Despite the significant increase in interest shown for
dehazing over the past few years, the validation of the dehazing methods
remains largely unsatisfactory, due to the lack of pairs of real hazy and
corresponding haze-free reference images. To address this limitation, we
introduce Dense-Haze - a novel dehazing dataset. Characterized by dense and
homogeneous hazy scenes, Dense-Haze contains 33 pairs of real hazy and
corresponding haze-free images of various outdoor scenes. The hazy scenes have
been recorded by introducing real haze, generated by professional haze
machines. The hazy and haze-free corresponding scenes contain the same visual
content captured under the same illumination parameters. Dense-Haze dataset
aims to push significantly the state-of-the-art in single-image dehazing by
promoting robust methods for real and various hazy scenes. We also provide a
comprehensive qualitative and quantitative evaluation of state-of-the-art
single image dehazing techniques based on the Dense-Haze dataset. Not
surprisingly, our study reveals that the existing dehazing techniques perform
poorly for dense homogeneous hazy scenes and that there is still much room for
improvement.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure
O-HAZE: a dehazing benchmark with real hazy and haze-free outdoor images
Haze removal or dehazing is a challenging ill-posed problem that has drawn a
significant attention in the last few years. Despite this growing interest, the
scientific community is still lacking a reference dataset to evaluate
objectively and quantitatively the performance of proposed dehazing methods.
The few datasets that are currently considered, both for assessment and
training of learning-based dehazing techniques, exclusively rely on synthetic
hazy images. To address this limitation, we introduce the first outdoor scenes
database (named O-HAZE) composed of pairs of real hazy and corresponding
haze-free images. In practice, hazy images have been captured in presence of
real haze, generated by professional haze machines, and OHAZE contains 45
different outdoor scenes depicting the same visual content recorded in
haze-free and hazy conditions, under the same illumination parameters. To
illustrate its usefulness, O-HAZE is used to compare a representative set of
state-of-the-art dehazing techniques, using traditional image quality metrics
such as PSNR, SSIM and CIEDE2000. This reveals the limitations of current
techniques, and questions some of their underlying assumptions.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1804.0509
A Cascaded Convolutional Neural Network for Single Image Dehazing
Images captured under outdoor scenes usually suffer from low contrast and
limited visibility due to suspended atmospheric particles, which directly
affects the quality of photos. Despite numerous image dehazing methods have
been proposed, effective hazy image restoration remains a challenging problem.
Existing learning-based methods usually predict the medium transmission by
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), but ignore the key global atmospheric
light. Different from previous learning-based methods, we propose a flexible
cascaded CNN for single hazy image restoration, which considers the medium
transmission and global atmospheric light jointly by two task-driven
subnetworks. Specifically, the medium transmission estimation subnetwork is
inspired by the densely connected CNN while the global atmospheric light
estimation subnetwork is a light-weight CNN. Besides, these two subnetworks are
cascaded by sharing the common features. Finally, with the estimated model
parameters, the haze-free image is obtained by the atmospheric scattering model
inversion, which achieves more accurate and effective restoration performance.
Qualitatively and quantitatively experimental results on the synthetic and
real-world hazy images demonstrate that the proposed method effectively removes
haze from such images, and outperforms several state-of-the-art dehazing
methods.Comment: This manuscript is accepted by IEEE ACCES
Joint Transmission Map Estimation and Dehazing using Deep Networks
Single image haze removal is an extremely challenging problem due to its
inherent ill-posed nature. Several prior-based and learning-based methods have
been proposed in the literature to solve this problem and they have achieved
superior results. However, most of the existing methods assume constant
atmospheric light model and tend to follow a two-step procedure involving
prior-based methods for estimating transmission map followed by calculation of
dehazed image using the closed form solution. In this paper, we relax the
constant atmospheric light assumption and propose a novel unified single image
dehazing network that jointly estimates the transmission map and performs
dehazing. In other words, our new approach provides an end-to-end learning
framework, where the inherent transmission map and dehazed result are learned
directly from the loss function. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real
datasets with challenging hazy images demonstrate that the proposed method
achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-art methods.Comment: This paper has been accepted in IEEE-TCSV
Benchmarking Single Image Dehazing and Beyond
We present a comprehensive study and evaluation of existing single image
dehazing algorithms, using a new large-scale benchmark consisting of both
synthetic and real-world hazy images, called REalistic Single Image DEhazing
(RESIDE). RESIDE highlights diverse data sources and image contents, and is
divided into five subsets, each serving different training or evaluation
purposes. We further provide a rich variety of criteria for dehazing algorithm
evaluation, ranging from full-reference metrics, to no-reference metrics, to
subjective evaluation and the novel task-driven evaluation. Experiments on
RESIDE shed light on the comparisons and limitations of state-of-the-art
dehazing algorithms, and suggest promising future directions.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Image Processing(TIP 2019
Real-world Underwater Enhancement: Challenges, Benchmarks, and Solutions
Underwater image enhancement is such an important low-level vision task with
many applications that numerous algorithms have been proposed in recent years.
These algorithms developed upon various assumptions demonstrate successes from
various aspects using different data sets and different metrics. In this work,
we setup an undersea image capturing system, and construct a large-scale
Real-world Underwater Image Enhancement (RUIE) data set divided into three
subsets. The three subsets target at three challenging aspects for enhancement,
i.e., image visibility quality, color casts, and higher-level
detection/classification, respectively. We conduct extensive and systematic
experiments on RUIE to evaluate the effectiveness and limitations of various
algorithms to enhance visibility and correct color casts on images with
hierarchical categories of degradation. Moreover, underwater image enhancement
in practice usually serves as a preprocessing step for mid-level and high-level
vision tasks. We thus exploit the object detection performance on enhanced
images as a brand new task-specific evaluation criterion. The findings from
these evaluations not only confirm what is commonly believed, but also suggest
promising solutions and new directions for visibility enhancement, color
correction, and object detection on real-world underwater images.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1712.04143 by other author
NTIRE 2020 Challenge on NonHomogeneous Dehazing
This paper reviews the NTIRE 2020 Challenge on NonHomogeneous Dehazing of
images (restoration of rich details in hazy image). We focus on the proposed
solutions and their results evaluated on NH-Haze, a novel dataset consisting of
55 pairs of real haze free and nonhomogeneous hazy images recorded outdoor.
NH-Haze is the first realistic nonhomogeneous haze dataset that provides ground
truth images. The nonhomogeneous haze has been produced using a professional
haze generator that imitates the real conditions of haze scenes. 168
participants registered in the challenge and 27 teams competed in the final
testing phase. The proposed solutions gauge the state-of-the-art in image
dehazing.Comment: CVPR Workshops Proceedings 202
A Smoke Removal Method for Laparoscopic Images
In laparoscopic surgery, image quality can be severely degraded by surgical
smoke, which not only introduces error for the image processing (used in image
guided surgery), but also reduces the visibility of the surgeons. In this
paper, we propose to enhance the laparoscopic images by decomposing them into
unwanted smoke part and enhanced part using a variational approach. The
proposed method relies on the observation that smoke has low contrast and low
inter-channel differences. A cost function is defined based on this prior
knowledge and is solved using an augmented Lagrangian method. The obtained
unwanted smoke component is then subtracted from the original degraded image,
resulting in the enhanced image. The obtained quantitative scores in terms of
FADE, JNBM and RE metrics show that our proposed method performs rather well.
Furthermore, the qualitative visual inspection of the results show that it
removes smoke effectively from the laparoscopic images
DR-Net: Transmission Steered Single Image Dehazing Network with Weakly Supervised Refinement
Despite the recent progress in image dehazing, several problems remain
largely unsolved such as robustness for varying scenes, the visual quality of
reconstructed images, and effectiveness and flexibility for applications. To
tackle these problems, we propose a new deep network architecture for single
image dehazing called DR-Net. Our model consists of three main subnetworks: a
transmission prediction network that predicts transmission map for the input
image, a haze removal network that reconstructs latent image steered by the
transmission map, and a refinement network that enhances the details and color
properties of the dehazed result via weakly supervised learning. Compared to
previous methods, our method advances in three aspects: (i) pure data-driven
model; (ii) the end-to-end system; (iii) superior robustness, accuracy, and
applicability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our DR-Net outperforms
the state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic and real images in qualitative
and quantitative metrics. Additionally, the utility of DR-Net has been
illustrated by its potential usage in several important computer vision tasks.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures, submitted to CVPR 201
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