One source of difficulties when processing outdoor images is the presence of haze, fog or smoke which fades the colors and reduces the contrast of the observed objects. We introduce a novel algorithm and variants for visibility restoration from a single image. The main advantage of the proposed algorithm compared with other is its speed: its complexity is a linear function of the number of image pixels only. This speed allows visibility restoration to be applied for the first time within real-time processing applications such as sign, lane-marking and obstacle detection from an in-vehicle camera. Another advantage is the possibility to handle both color images or gray level images since the ambiguity between the presence of fog and the objects with low color saturation is solved by assuming only small objects can have colors with low saturation. The algorithm is controlled only by a few parameters and consists in: atmospheric veil inference, image restoration and smoothing, tone mapping. A comparative study and quantitative evaluation is proposed with a few other state of the art algorithms which demonstrates that similar or better quality results are obtained. Finally, an application is presented to lane-marking extraction in gray level images, illustrating the interest of the approach.

The contrast of outdoor images acquired under adverse weather conditions, especially foggy weather, is altered by the scattering of daylight by atmospheric particles. As a consequence, differentmethods have been designed to restore the contrast of these images. However, there is a lack of methodology to assess the performances of the methods or to rate them. Unlike image quality assessment or image restoration areas, there is no easy way to have a reference image, which makes the problem not straightforward to solve. In this paper, an approach is proposed which consists in computing the ratio between the gradient of the visible edges between the image before and after contrast restoration. In this way, an indicator of visibility enhancement is provided based on the concept of visibility level, commonly used in lighting engineering. Finally, the methodology is applied to contrast enhancement assessment and to the comparison of tone-mapping operators.

One source of accidents when driving a vehicle is the presence of fog. Fog fades the colors and reduces the contrasts in the scene with respect to their distances from the driver. Various camera-based Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) can be improved if efficient algorithms are designed for visibility enhancement in road images. The visibility enhancement algorithm proposed in [1] is not optimized for road images. In this paper, we reformulate the problem as the inference of the local atmospheric veil from constraints. The algorithm in [1] thus becomes a particular case. From this new derivation, we propose to better handle road images by introducing an extra constraint taking into account that a large part of the image can be assumed to be a planar road. The advantages of the proposed local algorithm are the speed, the possibility to handle both color and gray-level images, and the small number of parameters. A new scheme is proposed for rating visibility enhancement algorithms based on the addition of several types of generated fog on synthetic and camera images. A comparative study and quantitative evaluation with other state-of-the-art algorithms is thus proposed. This evaluation demonstrates that the new algorithm produces better results with homogeneous fog and that it is able to deal better with the presence of heterogeneous fog. Finally, we also propose a model allowing to evaluate the potential safety benefit of an ADAS based on the display of defogged images.