Image based visibility estimation during day and night

Abstract

The meteorological visibility estimation is an important task, for example, in road traffic control and aviation safety, but its reliable automation is difficult. The conventional light scattering measurements are limited into a small space and the extrapolated values are often erroneous. The current meteorological visibility estimates relying on a single camera work only with data captured in day light. We propose a new method based on feature vectors that are projections of the scene images with lighting normalization. The proposed method was combined with the high dynamic range imaging to improve night time image quality. Visibility classification accuracy (F1) of 85.5% was achieved for data containing both day and night images. The results show that the approach can compete with commercial visibility measurement devices.