When one captures images in low-light conditions, the images often suffer from low visibility. Besides degrading the visual aesthetics of images, this poor quality may also significantly degenerate the performance of many computer vision and multimedia algorithms that are primarily designed for high-quality inputs. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective low-light image enhancement (LIME) method. More concretely, the illumination of each pixel is first estimated individually by finding the maximum value in R, G, and B channels. Furthermore, we refine the initial illumination map by imposing a structure prior on it, as the final illumination map. Having the well-constructed illumination map, the enhancement can be achieved accordingly. Experiments on a number of challenging low-light images are present to reveal the efficacy of our LIME and show its superiority over several state-of-the-arts in terms of enhancement quality and efficiency.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/ielaam/83/7763897/7782813-aam.pdf

LIME: Low-Light Image Enhancement via Illumination Map Estimation

We present a simple and effective blind image deblurring method based on the dark channel prior. Our work is inspired by the interesting observation that the dark channel of blurred images is less sparse. While most image patches in the clean image contain some dark pixels, these pixels are not dark when averaged with neighboring highintensity pixels during the blur process. This change in the sparsity of the dark channel is an inherent property of the blur process, which we both prove mathematically and validate using training data. Therefore, enforcing the sparsity of the dark channel helps blind deblurring on various scenarios, including natural, face, text, and low-illumination images. However, sparsity of the dark channel introduces a non-convex non-linear optimization problem. We introduce a linear approximation of the min operator to compute the dark channel. Our look-up-table-based method converges fast in practice and can be directly extended to non-uniform deblurring. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art results on deblurring natural images and compares favorably methods that are well-engineered for specific scenarios.

/pdf/blind-image-deblurring-using-dark-channel-prior-18dgca5tqh.pdf

Blind Image Deblurring Using Dark Channel Prior

The integration of spatial context in the classification of hyperspectral images is known to be an effective way in improving classification accuracy. In this paper, a novel spectral-spatial classification framework based on edge-preserving filtering is proposed. The proposed framework consists of the following three steps. First, the hyperspectral image is classified using a pixelwise classifier, e.g., the support vector machine classifier. Then, the resulting classification map is represented as multiple probability maps, and edge-preserving filtering is conducted on each probability map, with the first principal component or the first three principal components of the hyperspectral image serving as the gray or color guidance image. Finally, according to the filtered probability maps, the class of each pixel is selected based on the maximum probability. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed edge-preserving filtering based classification method can improve the classification accuracy significantly in a very short time. Thus, it can be easily applied in real applications.

Spectral–Spatial Hyperspectral Image Classification With Edge-Preserving Filtering

Visual distortions on images caused by bad weather conditions can have a negative impact on the performance of many outdoor vision systems. One often seen bad weather is rain which causes significant yet complex local intensity fluctuations in images. The paper aims at developing an effective algorithm to remove visual effects of rain from a single rainy image, i.e. separate the rain layer and the de-rained image layer from an rainy image. Built upon a non-linear generative model of rainy image, namely screen blend mode, we proposed a dictionary learning based algorithm for single image de-raining. The basic idea is to sparsely approximate the patches of two layers by very high discriminative codes over a learned dictionary with strong mutual exclusivity property. Such discriminative sparse codes lead to accurate separation of two layers from their non-linear composite. The experiments showed that the proposed method outperformed the existing single image de-raining methods on tested rain images.

/pdf/removing-rain-from-a-single-image-via-discriminative-sparse-1029uts615.pdf

Removing Rain from a Single Image via Discriminative Sparse Coding

We introduce an effective technique to enhance the images captured underwater and degraded due to the medium scattering and absorption. Our method is a single image approach that does not require specialized hardware or knowledge about the underwater conditions or scene structure. It builds on the blending of two images that are directly derived from a color-compensated and white-balanced version of the original degraded image. The two images to fusion, as well as their associated weight maps, are defined to promote the transfer of edges and color contrast to the output image. To avoid that the sharp weight map transitions create artifacts in the low frequency components of the reconstructed image, we also adapt a multiscale fusion strategy. Our extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluation reveals that our enhanced images and videos are characterized by better exposedness of the dark regions, improved global contrast, and edges sharpness. Our validation also proves that our algorithm is reasonably independent of the camera settings, and improves the accuracy of several image processing applications, such as image segmentation and keypoint matching.

/pdf/color-balance-and-fusion-for-underwater-image-enhancement-4cjuexzr3u.pdf

Color Balance and Fusion for Underwater Image Enhancement

Haze brings troubles to many computer vision/graphics applications. It reduces the visibility of the scenes and lowers the reliability of outdoor surveillance systems; it reduces the clarity of the satellite images; it also changes the colors and decreases the contrast of daily photos, which is an annoying problem to photographers. Therefore, removing haze from images is an important and widely demanded topic in computer vision and computer graphics areas. The main challenge lies in the ambiguity of the problem. Haze attenuates the light reflected from the scenes, and further blends it with some additive light in the atmosphere. The target of haze removal is to recover the reflected light (i.e., the scene colors) from the blended light. This problem is mathematically ambiguous: there are an infinite number of solutions given the blended light. How can we know which solution is true? We need to answer this question in haze removal. Ambiguity is a common challenge for many computer vision problems. In terms of mathematics, ambiguity is because the number of equations is smaller than the number of unknowns. The methods in computer vision to solve the ambiguity can roughly categorized into two strategies. The first one is to acquire more known variables, e.g., some haze removal algorithms capture multiple images of the same scene under different settings (like polarizers).But it is not easy to obtain extra images in practice. The second strategy is to impose extra constraints using some knowledge or assumptions .All the images in this thesis are best viewed in the electronic version. This way is more practical since it requires as few as only one image. To this end, we focus on single image haze removal in this thesis. The key is to find a suitable prior. Priors are important in many computer vision topics. A prior tells the algorithm "what can we know about the fact beforehand" when the fact is not directly available. In general, a prior can be some statistical/physical properties, rules, or heuristic assumptions. The performance of the algorithms is often determined by the extent to which the prior is valid. Some widely used priors in computer vision are the smoothness prior, sparsity prior, and symmetry prior. In this thesis, we develop an effective but very simple prior, called the dark channel prior, to remove haze from a single image. The dark channel prior is a statistical property of outdoor haze-free images: most patches in these images should contain pixels which are dark in at least one color channel. These dark pixels can be due to shadows, colorfulness, geometry, or other factors. This prior provides a constraint for each pixel, and thus solves the ambiguity of the problem. Combining this prior with a physical haze imaging model, we can easily recover high quality haze-free images.

Mohinder Malhotra

Papers

Single Image Haze Removal Using Dark Channel Prior