DMRVisNet: Deep Multi-head Regression Network for Pixel-wise Visibility Estimation Under Foggy Weather

Scene perception is essential for driving decision-making and traffic safety. However, fog, as a kind of common weather, frequently appears in the real world, especially in the mountain areas, making it difficult to accurately observe the surrounding environments. Therefore, precisely estimating the visibility under foggy weather can significantly benefit traffic management and safety. To address this, most current methods use professional instruments outfitted at fixed locations on the roads to perform the visibility measurement; these methods are expensive and less flexible. In this paper, we propose an innovative end-to-end convolutional neural network framework to estimate the visibility leveraging Koschmieder's law exclusively using the image data. The proposed method estimates the visibility by integrating the physical model into the proposed framework, instead of directly predicting the visibility value via the convolutional neural work. Moreover, we estimate the visibility as a pixel-wise visibility map against those of previous visibility measurement methods which solely predict a single value for an entire image. Thus, the estimated result of our method is more informative, particularly in uneven fog scenarios, which can benefit to developing a more precise early warning system for foggy weather, thereby better protecting the intelligent transportation infrastructure systems and promoting its development. To validate the proposed framework, a virtual dataset, FACI, containing 3,000 foggy images in different concentrations, is collected using the AirSim platform. Detailed experiments show that the proposed method achieves performance competitive to those of state-of-the-art methods.