Algorithms for scene restoration and visibility estimation from aerosol scatter impaired images

Attenuation and backscatter from aerosol suspension in the atmosphere cause drop in visibility which manifests as haziness or fogginess in images captured of objects at a distance, especially from airborne cameras. Two iterative algorithms, based on a physical model relating image intensity to ground reflectance as a function of the scatter process, are developed to restore the images and estimate the scatter coefficient. The algorithms are guaranteed to converge to unique solutions. Examples are provided with synthetic and real data.