Contrast Enhancement in Poor Visibility Conditions Using Guided Filtering

Abstract

In this paper, extraction of atmospheric veil is proposed to enhance the contrast of the images captured under poor visibility conditions. The method based on guided filtering can accurately recover hidden edges, maintain structural similarity (SSIM) to input image and it is effective for both color and gray level images. The proposed algorithm works without prior information about the scene and its complexity is linear function of the input image size. Experimental comparisons with state of the art algorithms demonstrate that our approach can significantly enhance the contrast and restore the visibility in fine details.

Keywords

• Poor visibility conditions
• atmospheric aerosols
• contrast enhancement
• atmospheric veil
• guided filter
• haze and fog removal