A Novel Physics-based Method for Restoration of Foggy Day Images

Scene visibility is very low in foggy days. We need to defog the surveillance video to make sure the intelligent visual surveillance system work normally. According to optics theory, the reduction of scene visibility is exponential to the scene depth. The defog effect of existing model-based methods are not good enough. In this paper, a new physics-based method of image restoration is presented. This method models scene points in foggy day firstly. Then the scene depth is calculated for two images which are captured in clear day and foggy day respectively. Image or video taken in foggy day is restored using depth information finally. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of this method.