Qingfeng Zhang

Papers from this author

Fast Region-Adaptive Defogging and Enhancement for Outdoor Images Containing Sky

Zhan Li, Xiaopeng Zheng, Bir Bhanu, Shun Long, Qingfeng Zhang, Zhenghao Huang

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Auto-TLDR; Image defogging and enhancement of hazy outdoor scenes using region-adaptive segmentation and region-ratio-based adaptive Gamma correction

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Inclement weather, haze, and fog severely decrease the performance of outdoor imaging systems. Due to a large range of the depth-of-field, most image dehazing or enhancement methods suffer from color distortions and halo artifacts when applied to real-world hazy outdoor scenes, especially those with the sky. To effectively recover details in both distant and nearby regions as well as to preserve color fidelity of the sky, in this study, we propose a novel image defogging and enhancement approach based on a replaceable plug-in segmentation module and region-adaptive processing. First, regions of the grayish sky, pure white objects, and other parts are separated. Several segmentation methods are studied, including an efficient threshold-based one used for this work. Second, a luminance-inverted multi-scale Retinex with color restoration (MSRCR) and region-ratio-based adaptive Gamma correction are applied to non-grayish and non-white areas. Finally, the enhanced regions are stitched seamlessly by using a mean-filtered region mask. The proposed method is efficient in defogging natural outdoor scenes and requires no training data or prior knowledge. Extensive experiments show that the proposed approach not only outperforms several state-of-the-art defogging methods in terms of both visibility and color fidelity, but also provides enhanced outputs with fewer artifacts and halos, particularly in sky regions.