Foreground scattering elimination by inverse lock-in-like spatial modulation

Abstract

We describe a simple approach to enhance vision, which is impaired by close range obscuring and/or scattering structures. Such structures may be found on a dirty windscreen of a car, or by tree branches blocking the vision of objects behind. The main idea is to spatially modulate the obscuration, either by periodically moving the detector/eye or by letting the obscuration modulate itself, such as branches swinging in the wind. The approach has similarities to electronic lock-in techniques, where the feature of interest is modulated to enable it to be isolated from the strong perturbing background, but now, we modulate the background instead to isolate the static feature of interest. Thus, the approach can be denoted as “inverse lock-in-like spatial modulation”. We also apply a new digital imaging processing technique based on a combination of the Interframe Difference and Gaussian Mixture models for digital separation between the objects of interest and the background, and make connections to the Gestalt vision psychology field.