Visibility Enhancement for Low-light Hazy Scenarios

Low-light hazy scenes commonly appear at dusk and early morning. The visual enhancement for low-light hazy images is an ill-posed problem. Even though numerous methods have been proposed for image dehazing and low-light enhancement respectively, simply integrating them cannot deliver pleasing results for this particular task. In this paper, we present a novel method to enhance visibility for low-light hazy scenarios. To handle this challenging task, we propose two key techniques, namely cross-consistency dehazing-enhancement framework and physically based simulation for low-light hazy dataset. Specifically, the framework is designed for enhancing visibility of the input image via fully utilizing the clues from different sub-tasks. The simulation is designed for generating the dataset with ground-truths by the proposed low-light hazy imaging model. The extensive experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the SOTA solutions on different metrics including SSIM (9.19%) and PSNR(5.03%). In addition, we conduct a user study on real images to demonstrate the effectiveness and necessity of the proposed method by human visual perception.

Polarization Guided Specular Reflection Separation

Since specular reflection often exists in the real captured images and causes deviation between the recorded color and intrinsic color, specular reflection separation can bring advantages to multiple applications that require consistent object surface appearance. However, due to the color of an object is significantly influenced by the color of the illumination, the existing researches still suffer from the near-duplicate challenge, that is, the separation becomes unstable when the illumination color is close to the surface color. In this paper, we derive a polarization guided model to incorporate the polarization information into a designed iteration optimization separation strategy to separate the specular reflection. Based on the analysis of polarization, we propose a polarization guided model to generate a polarization chromaticity image, which is able to reveal the geometrical profile of the input image in complex scenarios, such as diversity of illumination. The polarization chromaticity image can accurately cluster the pixels with similar diffuse color. We further use the specular separation of all these clusters as an implicit prior to ensure that the diffuse components will not be mistakenly separated as the specular components. With the polarization guided model, we reformulate the specular reflection separation into a unified optimization function which can be solved by the ADMM strategy. The specular reflection will be detected and separated jointly by RGB and polarimetric information. Both qualitative and quantitative experimental results have shown that our method can faithfully separate the specular reflection, especially in some challenging scenarios.

Joint Chromatic and Polarimetric Demosaicing via Sparse Coding

Thanks to the latest progress in image sensor manufacturing technology, the emergence of the single-chip polarized color sensor is likely to bring advantages to computer vision tasks. Despite the importance of the sensor, joint chromatic and polarimetric demosaicing is the key to obtaining the high-quality RGB-Polarization image for the sensor. Since the polarized color sensor is equipped with a new type of chip, the demosaicing problem cannot be currently well-addressed by former methods. In this paper, we propose a joint chromatic and polarimetric demosaicing model to address this challenging problem. To solve this non-convex problem, we further present a sparse representation-based optimization strategy that utilizes chromatic information and polarimetric information to jointly optimize the model. In addition, we build an optical data acquisition system to collect an RGB-Polarization dataset. Results of both qualitative and quantitative experiments have shown that our method is capable of faithfully recovering full 12-channel chromatic and polarimetric information for each pixel from a single mosaic input image. Moreover, we show that the proposed method can perform well not only on the synthetic data but the real captured data.