Model Adaptation with Synthetic and Real Data for Semantic Dense Foggy Scene Understanding

This work addresses the problem of semantic scene understanding under dense fog. Although considerable progress has been made in semantic scene understanding, it is mainly related to clear-weather scenes. Extending recognition methods to adverse weather conditions such as fog is crucial for outdoor applications. In this paper, we propose a novel method, named Curriculum Model Adaptation (CMAda), which gradually adapts a semantic segmentation model from light synthetic fog to dense real fog in multiple steps, using both synthetic and real foggy data. In addition, we present three other main stand-alone contributions: 1) a novel method to add synthetic fog to real, clear-weather scenes using semantic input; 2) a new fog density estimator; 3) the Foggy Zurich dataset comprising $3808$ real foggy images, with pixel-level semantic annotations for $16$ images with dense fog. Our experiments show that 1) our fog simulation slightly outperforms a state-of-the-art competing simulation with respect to the task of semantic foggy scene understanding (SFSU); 2) CMAda improves the performance of state-of-the-art models for SFSU significantly by leveraging unlabeled real foggy data. The datasets and code are publicly available.Comment: final version, ECCV 201

A Study of Atmospheric Particles Removal in a Low Visibility Outdoor Single Image

Maximum limit of human visibility without the assistance of equipment is 1000 m based on International Commission on Illumination. The use of camera in the outdoor for the purpose of navigation, monitoring, remote sensing and robotic movement sometimes may yield images that are interrupted by haze, fog, smoke, steam and water drops. Fog is the random movement of water drops in the air that normally exists in the early morning. This disorder causes a differential image observed experiences low contrast, obscure, and difficult to identify targets. Analysis of the interference image can restore damaged image as a result of obstacles from atmospheric particles or drops of water during image observation. Generally, images with atmospheric particles contain a homogeneous texture like brightness and a heterogeneous texture which is the object that exists in the atmosphere. Pre-processing method based on the dark channel prior statistical measure of contrast vision and prior knowledge, still produces good image quality but less effective to overcome Halo problem or ring light, and strong lighting. This study aims to propel the development of machine vision industry aimed at navigation or monitoring for ground transportation, air or sea

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

Uniform Distorted Scene Reduction on Distribution of Colour Cast Correction

Scene in the photo occulated by uniform particles distribution can degrade the image quality accidently. State of the art pre-processing methods are able to enhance visibility by employing local and global filters on the image scene. Regardless of air light and transmission map right estimation, those methods unfortunately produce artifacts and halo effects because of uncorrelated problem between the global and local filter’s windows. Besides, previous approaches might abruptly eliminate the primary scene structure of an image like texture and colour. Therefore, this study aims not solely to improve scene image quality via a recovery method but also to overcome image content issues such as the artefacts and halo effects, and finally to reduce the light disturbance in the scene image. We introduce our proposed visibility enhancement method by using joint ambience distribution that improves the colour cast in the image. Furthermore, the method is able to balance the atmospheric light in correspondence to the depth map accordingly. Consequently, our method maintains the image texture structural information by calculating the lighting estimation and maintaining a range of colours simultaneously. The method is tested on images from the Benchmarking Single Image Dehazing research by assessing their clear edge ratio, gradient, range of saturated pixels, and structural similarity metric index. The scene image restoration assessment results show that our proposed method had outperformed resuls from the Tan, Tarel and He methods by gaining the highest score in the structural similarity index and colourfulness measurement. Furthermore, our proposed method also had achieved acceptable gradient ratio and percentage of the number of saturated pixels. The proposed approach enhances the visibility in the images without affecting them structurally

Using User Generated Online Photos to Estimate and Monitor Air Pollution in Major Cities

With the rapid development of economy in China over the past decade, air pollution has become an increasingly serious problem in major cities and caused grave public health concerns in China. Recently, a number of studies have dealt with air quality and air pollution. Among them, some attempt to predict and monitor the air quality from different sources of information, ranging from deployed physical sensors to social media. These methods are either too expensive or unreliable, prompting us to search for a novel and effective way to sense the air quality. In this study, we propose to employ the state of the art in computer vision techniques to analyze photos that can be easily acquired from online social media. Next, we establish the correlation between the haze level computed directly from photos with the official PM 2.5 record of the taken city at the taken time. Our experiments based on both synthetic and real photos have shown the promise of this image-based approach to estimating and monitoring air pollution.Comment: ICIMCS '1