Enhancement of weather degraded color images and video sequences using wavelet fusion

Abstract

The image in outdoor scene is degraded by optical scattering of light which produces additional lightness present in some parts of the image. In this work a method for enhancing visibility and maintaining color fidelity is proposed using wavelet fusion. This method mainly consists of three phases. Given an input image, first phase is to apply a contrast correction using the depth information. Here we compute the value of airlight present in the image by optimizing a cost function. The second phase consists of finding an approximate airlight value by using the intensity information of YIQ color model. Contrast restoration in the first and second phase is performed by removing the airlight from the image and applying depth information. The third and final phase of the proposed method consists of a wavelet fusion method to get a resultant image which has considerable visibility improvement and also maintains the color fidelity. © 2009 Springer Netherlands.