Visibility Enhancement for Roads with Foggy or Hazy Scenes

Bad weather, particularly fog and haze, commonly obstruct drivers from observing road conditions. This could frequently lead to a considerable number of road accidents. To avoid the problem, automatic methods have been proposed to enhance visibility in bad weather. Methods that work on visible wavelengths, based on the type of their input, can be categorized into two approaches: those using polarizing filters, and those using images taken from different fog densities. Both of the approaches require that the images are multiple and taken from exactly the same point of view. While they can produce reasonably good results, their requirement makes them impractical, particularly in real time applications, such as vehicle systems. Considering their drawbacks, our goal is to develop a method that requires solely a single image taken from ordinary digital cameras, without any additional hardware. The method principally uses color and intensity information. It enhances the visibility after estimating the color of skylight and the values of airlight. The experimental results on real images show the effectiveness of the approach.