Mapping and Deep Analysis of Image Dehazing: Coherent Taxonomy, Datasets, Open Challenges, Motivations, and Recommendations

Our study aims to review and analyze the most relevant studies in the image dehazing field. Many aspects have been deemed necessary to provide a broad understanding of various studies that have been examined through surveying the existing literature. These aspects are as follows: datasets that have been used in the literature, challenges that other researchers have faced, motivations, and recommendations for diminishing the obstacles in the reported literature. A systematic protocol is employed to search all relevant articles on image dehazing, with variations in keywords, in addition to searching for evaluation and benchmark studies. The search process is established on three online databases, namely, IEEE Xplore, Web of Science (WOS), and ScienceDirect (SD), from 2008 to 2021. These indices are selected because they are sufficient in terms of coverage. Along with definition of the inclusion and exclusion criteria, we include 152 articles to the final set. A total of 55 out of 152 articles focused on various studies that conducted image dehazing, and 13 out 152 studies covered most of the review papers based on scenarios and general overviews. Finally, most of the included articles centered on the development of image dehazing algorithms based on real-time scenario (84/152) articles. Image dehazing removes unwanted visual effects and is often considered an image enhancement technique, which requires a fully automated algorithm to work under real-time outdoor applications, a reliable evaluation method, and datasets based on different weather conditions. Many relevant studies have been conducted to meet these critical requirements. We conducted objective image quality assessment experimental comparison of various image dehazing algorithms. In conclusions unlike other review papers, our study distinctly reflects different observations on image dehazing areas. We believe that the result of this study can serve as a useful guideline for practitioners who are looking for a comprehensive view on image dehazing

Investigation of advanced navigation and guidance system concepts for all-weather rotorcraft operations

Results are presented of a survey conducted of active helicopter operators to determine the extent to which they wish to operate in IMC conditions, the visibility limits under which they would operate, the revenue benefits to be gained, and the percent of aircraft cost they would pay for such increased capability. Candidate systems were examined for capability to meet the requirements of a mission model constructed to represent the modes of flight normally encountered in low visibility conditions. Recommendations are made for development of high resolution radar, simulation of the control display system for steep approaches, and for development of an obstacle sensing system for detecting wires. A cost feasibility analysis is included

Visibility recovery on images acquired in attenuating media. Application to underwater, fog, and mammographic imaging

136 p.When acquired in attenuating media, digital images of ten suffer from a particularly complex degradation that reduces their visual quality, hindering their suitability for further computational applications, or simply decreasing the visual pleasan tness for the user. In these cases, mathematical image processing reveals it self as an ideal tool to recover some of the information lost during the degradation process. In this dissertation,we deal with three of such practical scenarios in which this problematic is specially relevant, namely, underwater image enhancement, fogremoval and mammographic image processing. In the case of digital mammograms,X-ray beams traverse human tissue, and electronic detectorscapture them as they reach the other side. However, the superposition on a bidimensional image of three-dimensional structures produces low contraste dimages in which structures of interest suffer from a diminished visibility, obstructing diagnosis tasks. Regarding fog removal, the loss of contrast is produced by the atmospheric conditions, and white colour takes over the scene uniformly as distance increases, also reducing visibility.For underwater images, there is an added difficulty, since colour is not lost uniformly; instead, red colours decay the fastest, and green and blue colours typically dominate the acquired images. To address all these challenges,in this dissertation we develop new methodologies that rely on: a)physical models of the observed degradation, and b) the calculus of variations.Equipped with this powerful machinery, we design novel theoreticaland computational tools, including image-dependent functional energies that capture the particularities of each degradation model. These energie sare composed of different integral terms that are simultaneous lyminimized by means of efficient numerical schemes, producing a clean,visually-pleasant and use ful output image, with better contrast and increased visibility. In every considered application, we provide comprehensive qualitative (visual) and quantitative experimental results to validateour methods, confirming that the developed techniques out perform other existing approaches in the literature

Visibility in underwater robotics: Benchmarking and single image dehazing

Dealing with underwater visibility is one of the most important challenges in autonomous underwater robotics. The light transmission in the water medium degrades images making the interpretation of the scene difficult and consequently compromising the whole intervention. This thesis contributes by analysing the impact of the underwater image degradation in commonly used vision algorithms through benchmarking. An online framework for underwater research that makes possible to analyse results under different conditions is presented. Finally, motivated by the results of experimentation with the developed framework, a deep learning solution is proposed capable of dehazing a degraded image in real time restoring the original colors of the image.Una de las dificultades más grandes de la robótica autónoma submarina es lidiar con la falta de visibilidad en imágenes submarinas. La transmisión de la luz en el agua degrada las imágenes dificultando el reconocimiento de objetos y en consecuencia la intervención. Ésta tesis se centra en el análisis del impacto de la degradación de las imágenes submarinas en algoritmos de visión a través de benchmarking, desarrollando un entorno de trabajo en la nube que permite analizar los resultados bajo diferentes condiciones. Teniendo en cuenta los resultados obtenidos con este entorno, se proponen métodos basados en técnicas de aprendizaje profundo para mitigar el impacto de la degradación de las imágenes en tiempo real introduciendo un paso previo que permita recuperar los colores originales

Always Clear Days: Degradation Type and Severity Aware All-In-One Adverse Weather Removal

All-in-one adverse weather removal is an emerging topic on image restoration, which aims to restore multiple weather degradation in an unified model, and the challenging are twofold. First, discovering and handling the property of multi-domain in target distribution formed by multiple weather conditions. Second, design efficient and effective operations for different degradation types. To address this problem, most prior works focus on the multi-domain caused by weather type. Inspired by inter\&intra-domain adaptation literature, we observed that not only weather type but also weather severity introduce multi-domain within each weather type domain, which is ignored by previous methods, and further limit their performance. To this end, we proposed a degradation type and severity aware model, called \textbf{UtilityIR}, for blind all-in-one bad weather image restoration. To extract weather information from single image, we proposed a novel Marginal Quality Ranking Loss (MQRL) and utilized Contrastive Loss (CL) to guide weather severity and type extraction, and leverage a bag of novel techniques such as Multi-Head Cross Attention (MHCA) and Local-Global Adaptive Instance Normalization (LG-AdaIN) to efficiently restore spatial varying weather degradation. The proposed method can significantly outperform the SOTA methods subjectively and objectively on different weather restoration tasks with a large margin, and enjoy less model parameters. Proposed method even can restore \textbf{unseen} domain combined multiple degradation images, and modulating restoration level. Implementation code will be available at {https://github.com/fordevoted/UtilityIR}{\textit{this repository}}Comment: 12 pages, 12 figure

High dynamic range color image enhancement using fuzzy logic and bacterial foraging

High dynamic range images contain both the underexposed and the overexposed regions. The enhancement of the underexposed and the overexposed regions is the main concern of this paper. Two new transformation functions are proposed to modify the fuzzy membership values of under and the overexposed regions of an image respectively.For the overexposed regions, a rectangular hyperbolic function is used while for the underexposed regions, an S-function is applied. The shape and range of these functions can be controlled by the parameters involved, which are optimized using the bacterial foraging optimization algorithm so as to obtain the enhanced image. The hue, saturation, and intensity (HSV) color space is employed for the purpose of enhancement, where the hue component is preserved to keep the original color composition intact. This approach is applicable to a degraded image of mixed type. On comparison, the proposed transforms yield better results than the existing transformation functions17 for both the underexposed and the overexposed regions