Hardy Variation Framework for Restoration of Weather Degraded Images

Images captured in fog conditions often suffer from weather of poor visibility which fades the colors and reduces the contrast in the scene. This paper proposes a novel regularization method which utilizes space transformation in order to restore the hidden scene with high dynamic range and enhanced edge information. In order to efficiently improve the visualization, the proposed method is built upon contrast stretching which can obtain better estimation map as well as solve the problem. Using minimum energy constraints, the algorithm recovers scene albedo on a number of haze images. Experimental results show that the method effectively achieves accurate and true representation.