Contrast restoration of road images taken in foggy weather

Driver assistance systems based on camera are strongly disturbed by the presence of foggy weather. The restoration of images, as pre-processing, would improve the performances of such systems. In this paper, we propose a method to restore the image contrast of foggy road scenes combining a physical approach, based on Koschmieders model and a signals approach, based on local histogram equalization. Then we optimize the parameters of our method using a simulated annealing. This method, evaluated on a reference image database, presents a significant improvement compared to other methods and gives consistent results for both homogeneous and inhomogeneous fog.