Journal d'informatique et de biologie des systèmes

Detecting Foggy Images and Estimating the Haze Degree Factor

Abstract

Jun Mao, Uthai Phommasak, Shinya Watanabe and Hiroyuki Shioya

Limited visibility in haze weather strongly influences the accuracy and the general functions of almost outdoor video surveillance or driver assistance systems. Actual weather condition is valuable information to invoke corresponding approaches. Based on the atmospheric scattering model analysis and the statistics of various outdoor images, for most foggy images, we find that the lowest and highest value in color channels tends to be the same value of atmospheric light. A function for estimating the haze degree is developed for the automatic detection of the foggy image with different haze degrees. Experimental results show that our haze classification method achieves high performance.