Abstract
Outdoor images captured during sandstorm weather condition frequently yield color cast and poor visibility, which causes some applications to fail in computer vision, such as video surveillance and object recognition systems. In this paper, a fast color balance method followed by an effective fusion model is proposed to enhance the sandstorm-degraded images. Firstly, color channel compensation and piece-wise affine transform balance the aberrant pixels obtained by camera and remove color cast. Then, multi-path fusion comprising of underexposure and contrast-enhanced inputs is used for visibility enhancement, where saturation and Laplacian contrast are measured as weight maps and constructed for Gaussian pyramids. In order to reduce block effects and artifacts of the reconstructed image, we introduce the multi-scale strategy for each path. Experimental results of both synthetic and real-world sandstorm images demonstrate that the proposed color balance method features high computational efficiency and performs much better than comparative methods in terms of image quality. In addition, our fusion-based method also outperforms existing enhancement algorithms of sandstorm image via qualitative and quantitative evaluations.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Availability of data and material
The raw data can be shared if the researchers need to do research on relevant topic and cite it in their papers.
Code availability
The code can be shared in the near future for the sake of development.
References
Gijsenij, A., Gevers, T., Van De Weijer, J.: Computational color constancy: survey and experiments. IEEE Trans. Image Process. 20(9), 2475–2489 (2011)
Land, E.: The retinex theory of colour vision. Sci. Am. 237(6), 108–128 (1977)
Finlayson, G.D., Trezzi, E.: Shades of gray and colour constancy. In: Proceedings of Color and Imaging Conference, pp. 37–41 (2004)
Van De Weijer, J., Gevers, T., Gijsenij, A.: Edge-based color constancy. IEEE Trans. Image Process. 16(9), 2207–2214 (2007)
Gijsenij, A., Gevers, T., Van De Weijer, J.: Improving color constancy by photometric edge weighting. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 34(5), 918–929 (2012)
He, K., Sun, J., Tang, X.: Single image haze removal using dark channel prior. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 33(12), 2341–2353 (2011)
Zhao, D., Xu, L., Yan, Y., Chen, J., Duan, L.: Multi-scale optimal fusion model for single image dehazing. Signal Process. Image Commun. 74, 253–265 (2019)
Li, Y., Miao, Q., Liu, R., Song, J., Quan, Y., Huang, Y.: A multi-scale fusion scheme based on haze-relevant features for single image dehazing. Neurocomputing 283, 73–86 (2018)
Fu, X., Huang, Y., Zeng, D., Zhang, X.P., Ding, X.: A fusion-based enhancing approach for single sandstorm image. In: 2014 IEEE 16th International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing, pp. 1–5. IEEE, Jakarta (2014)
Huang, S., Chen, B., Wang, W.: Visibility restoration of single hazy images captured in real-world weather conditions. IEEE Trans. Circ. Syst. Video Technol. 24(10), 1814–1824 (2014)
Huang, S., Ye, J., Chen, B.: An advanced single-image visibility restoration algorithm for real-world hazy scenes. IEEE Trans. Ind. Electron. 62(5), 2962–2972 (2014)
Yu, S., Zhu, H., Wang, J., Fu, Z., Xue, S., Shi, H.: Single sand-dust image restoration using information loss constraint. J. Mod. Opt. 63(21), 2121–2130 (2016)
Zhi, N., Mao, S., Li, M.: Visibility restoration algorithm of dust-degraded images. J. Image Graph. 21(12), 1585–1592 (2016)
Pan, H., Tian, R., Liu, C., Gong, C.: A sand-dust degraded image enhancement algorithm based on color correction and information loss constraints. J. Comput. Aided Des. Comput. Graph. 30(6), 992–999 (2018)
Shi, Z., Feng, Y., Zhao, M., Zhang, E., He, L.: Let you see in sand dust weather: a method based on halo-reduced dark channel prior dehazing for sand-dust image enhancement. IEEE Access 7, 116722–116733 (2019)
Morel, J.M., Petro, A.B., Sbert, C.: Screened Poisson equation for image contrast enhancement. Image Process. On Line 4, 16–29 (2014)
Ancuti, C.O., Ancuti, C., De Vleeschouwer, C., Bekaert, P.: Color balance and fusion for underwater image enhancement. IEEE Trans. Image Process. 27(1), 379–393 (2017)
Zuiderveld, K., Heckbert, P.: Contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization. In: Graphics Gems IV. New York (1994)
Galdran, A.: Image dehazing by artificial multiple-exposure image fusion. Signal Process. 149, 135–147 (2018)
Zhang, L., Zhang, L., Mou, X., Zhang, D.: FSIM: a feature similarity index for image quality assessment. IEEE Trans. Image Process. 20(8), 2378–2386 (2011)
Al-Ameen, Z.: Visibility enhancement for images captured in dusty weather via tuned tri-threshold fuzzy intensification operators. Int. J. Intell. Syst. Appl. 8(8), 10–17 (2016)
Mittal, A., Soundararajan, R., Bovik, A.C.: Making a “completely blind” image quality analyzer. IEEE Signal Process. Lett. 20(3), 209–212 (2013)
Xu, Y., Wen, J., Fei, L., Zhang, Z.: Review of video and image defogging algorithms and related studies on image restoration and enhancement. IEEE Access 4, 165–188 (2016)
Acknowledgements
This work is supported by Higher Education Scientific Research Project of Ningxia (NGY2017009).
Funding
This work is supported by Higher Education Scientific Research Project of Ningxia (NGY2017009).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
No conflict of interest exits in the submission of this manuscript, and the manuscript is approved by all authors for publication.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Wang, B., Wei, B., Kang, Z. et al. Fast color balance and multi-path fusion for sandstorm image enhancement. SIViP 15, 637–644 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-020-01786-1
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-020-01786-1