Single Image Dehazing
We want to tackle the image/video pipeline across the board. Starting from the image capturing step, we focus on restoration applications that aim to recover the lost visual information due to poor acquisition conditions. Our work centers around the task of Single Image Dehazing which deals with recovering the scene information from images that have been affected by atmospheric haze.
Haze is an atmospheric phenomenon that arises when dust, smoke and other atmospheric particles absorb and scatter light. The radiance of objects attenuates as it traverses from the scene point to the camera and blends with additive atmospheric light, corrupting the visibility of the scene.
In computer vision, a hazy image, I(x), is determined by the amount of transmitted light that remains from the the clear scene, J(x), after traveling a distance, d(x), and the atmospheric light intensity, A(x).
I(x) = J(x) + J(x)t(x) + A(x)(1 – t(x))
The amount of particulates in the atmosphere cause the transmitted light to decay exponentially with the distance traveled. It is represented by the extinction coefficient, β.
t(x) = exp(-βd(x))
One can attempt to recover the clear image by solving the atmospheric light scattering model.
Here at DeepCamera, we dedicate our research for understanding, analyzing and improving the task of single image dehazing. We focus on building the foundations to foster algorithmic innovation in dehazing for both the classical image processing approach and the modern deep-learning domain.
Our team has created its very own repository of hazy datasets. Using the atmospheric scattering model, we were able to render 45 different levels of atmospheric haze on the Microsoft Common Objects in Context (COCO) dataset. Our collection holds over 150K fully annotated images, ready for benchmark tasks such as classification and object detection under different hazy conditions.
The single image dehazing literature has accumulated a wealth of algorithms over the years, and with them several evaluation metrics have spawned. We realize that while these evaluation metrics are successful in their intended purpose, they each address different aspects of the task. Our team has eliminated the need to trade off in evaluation by formulating a single objective performance indicator out the combination of these metrics.