Robust Dehaze Algorithm for Degraded Image of CMOS Image Sensors

Color-Dense Illumination Adjustment Network for Removing Haze and Smoke from Fire Scenario Images

The atmospheric particles and aerosols from burning usually cause visual artifacts in single images captured from fire scenarios. Most existing haze removal methods exploit the atmospheric scattering model (ASM) for visual enhancement, which inevitably leads to inaccurate estimation of the atmosphere light and transmission matrix of the smoky and hazy inputs. To solve these problems, we present a novel color-dense illumination adjustment network (CIANet) for joint recovery of transmission matrix, illumination intensity, and the dominant color of aerosols from a single image. Meanwhile, to improve the visual effects of the recovered images, the proposed CIANet jointly optimizes the transmission map, atmospheric optical value, the color of aerosol, and a preliminary recovered scene. Furthermore, we designed a reformulated ASM, called the aerosol scattering model (ESM), to smooth out the enhancement results while keeping the visual effects and the semantic information of different objects. Experimental results on both the proposed RFSIE and NTIRE’20 demonstrate our superior performance favorably against state-of-the-art dehazing methods regarding PSNR, SSIM and subjective visual quality. Furthermore, when concatenating CIANet with Faster R-CNN, we witness an improvement of the objection performance with a large margin.

A Review of Remote Sensing Image Dehazing

Remote sensing (RS) is one of the data collection technologies that help explore more earth surface information. However, RS data captured by satellite are susceptible to particles suspended during the imaging process, especially for data with visible light band. To make up for such deficiency, numerous dehazing work and efforts have been made recently, whose strategy is to directly restore single hazy data without the need for using any extra information. In this paper, we first classify the current available algorithm into three categories, i.e., image enhancement, physical dehazing, and data-driven. The advantages and disadvantages of each type of algorithm are then summarized in detail. Finally, the evaluation indicators used to rank the recovery performance and the application scenario of the RS data haze removal technique are discussed, respectively. In addition, some common deficiencies of current available methods and future research focus are elaborated.

On-CMOS Image Sensor Processing for Lane Detection

This paper presents a CMOS image sensor (CIS) with built-in lane detection computing circuits for automotive applications. We propose on-CIS processing with an edge detection mask used in the readout circuit of the conventional CIS structure for high-speed lane detection. Furthermore, the edge detection mask can detect the edges of slanting lanes to improve accuracy. A prototype of the proposed CIS was fabricated using a 110 nm CIS process. It has an image resolution of 160 (H) × 120 (V) and a frame rate of 113, and it occupies an area of 5900 μm × 5240 μm. A comparison of its lane detection accuracy with that of existing edge detection algorithms shows that it achieves an acceptable accuracy. Moreover, the total power consumption of the proposed CIS is 9.7 mW at pixel, analog, and digital supply voltages of 3.3, 3.3, and 1.5 V, respectively.

Visibility Restoration: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Image acquisition is a complex process that is affected by a wide variety of internal and environmental factors. Hence, visibility restoration is crucial for many high-level applications in photography and computer vision. This paper provides a systematic review and meta-analysis of visibility restoration algorithms with a focus on those that are pertinent to poor weather conditions. This paper starts with an introduction to optical image formation and then provides a comprehensive description of existing algorithms as well as a comparative evaluation. Subsequently, there is a thorough discussion on current difficulties that are worthy of a scientific effort. Moreover, this paper proposes a general framework for visibility restoration in hazy weather conditions while using haze-relevant features and maximum likelihood estimates. Finally, a discussion on the findings and future developments concludes this paper.

Gated Dehazing Network via Least Square Adversarial Learning

In a hazy environment, visibility is reduced and objects are difficult to identify. For this reason, many dehazing techniques have been proposed to remove the haze. Especially, in the case of the atmospheric scattering model estimation-based method, there is a problem of distortion when inaccurate models are estimated. We present a novel residual-based dehazing network model to overcome the performance limitation in an atmospheric scattering model-based method. More specifically, the proposed model adopted the gate fusion network that generates the dehazed results using a residual operator. To further reduce the divergence between the clean and dehazed images, the proposed discriminator distinguishes dehazed results and clean images, and then reduces the statistical difference via adversarial learning. To verify each element of the proposed model, we hierarchically performed the haze removal process in an ablation study. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperformed state-of-the-art approaches in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index measure (SSIM), international commission on illumination cie delta e 2000 (CIEDE2000), and mean squared error (MSE). It also gives subjectively high-quality images without color distortion or undesired artifacts for both synthetic and real-world hazy images.

Evaluation of Several Feature Detectors/Extractors on Underwater Images towards vSLAM

Modern visual SLAM (vSLAM) algorithms take advantage of computer vision developments in image processing and in interest point detectors to create maps and trajectories from camera images. Different feature detectors and extractors have been evaluated for this purpose in air and ground environments, but not extensively for underwater scenarios. In this paper (I) we characterize underwater images where light and suspended particles alter considerably the images captured, (II) evaluate the performance of common interest points detectors and descriptors in a variety of underwater scenes and conditions towards vSLAM in terms of the number of features matched in subsequent video frames, the precision of the descriptors and the processing time. This research justifies the usage of feature detectors in vSLAM for underwater scenarios and present its challenges and limitations.

Design of an Edge-Detection CMOS Image Sensor with Built-in Mask Circuits

In this paper, we propose a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) image sensor (CIS) that has built-in mask circuits to selectively capture either edge-detection images or normal 8-bit images for low-power computer vision applications. To detect the edges of images in the CIS, neighboring column data are compared in in-column memories after column-parallel analog-to-digital conversion with the proposed mask. The proposed built-in mask circuits are implemented in the CIS without a complex image signal processer to obtain edge images with high speed and low power consumption. According to the measurement results, edge images were successfully obtained with a maximum frame rate of 60 fps. A prototype sensor with 1920 × 1440 resolution was fabricated with a 90-nm 1-poly 5-metal CIS process. The area of the 4-shared 4T-active pixel sensor was 1.4 × 1.4 µm², and the chip size was 5.15 × 5.15 mm². The total power consumption was 9.4 mW at 60 fps with supply voltages of 3.3 V (analog), 2.8 V (pixel), and 1.2 V (digital).