Recent studies have demonstrated that a bilateral filter can increase the quality of edge-preserving image smoothing significantly. Different strategies or mechanisms have been used to eliminate the brute-force computation in bilateral filters. However, blindly decreasing the processing time of the bilateral filter cannot further ameliorate the effectiveness of filter. In addition, even when the processing speed of the filter is decreased, inherent problem occurred in the Gaussian range kernel when facing a noise filtering input and its effect on edge-preserving image smoothing operation are barely discussed. In this letter, we propose a novel Gaussian-adaptive bilateral filter (GABF) to resolve the aforementioned problem. The basic idea is to acquire a low-pass guidance for the range kernel by a Gaussian spatial kernel. Such low-pass guidance lead to a clean Gaussian range kernel for later bilateral composite. The results of experiments conducted on several test datasets indicate that the proposed GABF outperforms most existing bilateral-filter-based methods.

Image dehazing is a crucial image processing step for outdoor vision systems. However, images recovered through conventional image dehazing methods that use either haze-relevant priors or heuristic cues to estimate transmission maps may not lead to sufficiently accurate haze removal from single images. The most commonly observed effects are darkened and brightened artifacts on some areas of the recovered images, which cause considerable loss of fidelity, brightness, and sharpness. This study develops a variational image dehazing method on the basis of a color-transfer image dehazing model that is superior to conventional image dehazing methods. By creating a color-transfer image dehazing model to remove haze obscuration and acquire information regarding the coefficients of the model by using the devised convolutional neural network based deep framework as a supervised learning strategy, an imageb’s fidelity, brightness, and sharpness can be effectively restored. Experimental results verify through quantitative and qualitative evaluations of either synthesized or real haze images that the proposed method outperforms existing single image dehazing methods.

Advanced wireless imaging sensors and cloud data storage contribute to video surveillance by enabling the generation of large amounts of video footage every second. Consequently, surveillance videos have become one of the largest sources of unstructured data. Because multi-scenario surveillance videos are often continuously produced, using these videos to detect moving objects is challenging for the conventional moving object detection methods. This paper presents a novel model that harnesses both sparsity and low-rankness with contextual regularization to detect moving objects in multi-scenario surveillance data. In the proposed model, we consider moving objects as a contiguous outlier detection problem through the use of low-rank constraint with contextual regularization, and we construct dedicated backgrounds for multiple scenarios using dictionary learning-based sparse representation, which ensures that our model can be effectively applied to multi-scenario videos. Quantitative and qualitative assessments indicate that the proposed model outperforms existing methods and achieves substantially more robust performance than the other state-of-the-art methods.

Intelligent vehicles use advanced driver assistance systems (ADASs) to mitigate driving risks. There is increasing demand for an ADAS framework that can increase driving safety by detecting dangerous driving behavior from driver, vehicle, and lane attributes. However, because dangerous driving behavior in real-world driving scenarios can be caused by any or a combination of driver, vehicle, and lane attributes, the detection of dangerous driving behavior using conventional approaches that focus on only one type of attribute may not be sufficient to improve driving safety in realistic situations. To facilitate driving safety improvements, the concept of dangerous driving intensity (DDI) is introduced in this paper, and the objective of dangerous driving behavior detection is converted into DDI estimation based on the three attribute types. To this end, we propose a framework wherein fuzzy sets are optimized using particle swarm optimization for modeling driver, vehicle, and lane attributes and then used to accurately estimate the DDI. The mean opinion scores of experienced drivers are employed to label DDI for a fair comparison with the results of our framework. The experimental results demonstrate that the driver, vehicle, and lane attributes defined in this paper provide useful cues for DDI analysis; furthermore, the results obtained using the framework are in favorable agreement with those obtained in the perception study. The proposed framework can greatly increase driving safety in intelligent vehicles, where most of the driving risk is within the control of the driver.

Impulse noise corruption in digital images frequently occurs because of errors generated by noisy sensors or communication channels, such as faulty memory locations in devices, malfunctioning pixels within a camera, or bit errors in transmission. Although recently developed big data streaming enhances the viability of video communication, visual distortions in images caused by impulse noise corruption can negatively affect video communication applications. In addition, ${{sparsity}}$ , ${{density}}$ , and ${{multimodality}}$ in large volumes of noisy images have often been ignored in recent studies, whereas these issues have become important because of the increasing viability of video communication services. To effectively eliminate the visual effects generated by the impulse noise from the corrupted images, this study proposes a novel model that uses a devised cost function involving semisupervised learning based on a large amount of corrupted image data with a few labeled training samples. The proposed model qualitatively and quantitatively outperforms the existing state-of-the-art image reconstruction models in terms of the denoising effect.

Outdoor images captured during hazy conditions have degraded visibility. The lack of both a medium transmission and atmospheric lights in a single haze image cause an ill-posed problem in the atmospheric scattering model. This paper proposes a novel haze density estimation model with a universal atmospheric-light extractor for single-image dehazing. The proposed method employs exponential inference to construct an exponential inference model to more accurately estimate haze density compared with the state-of-the-art methods. The coefficients in the proposed haze density estimation model are learned using a turbulent particle swarm optimization technique to obtain the best approximation of medium transmission. Moreover, a novel universal atmospheric-light extractor based on support vector data description is utilized to resolve the problem caused by a lack of atmospheric light. The overall results obtained by conducting qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrated that the proposed method has substantially higher dehazing efficacy and produces fewer artifacts than the state-of-the-art haze removal methods.