In sand-dust environments, the low quality of images captured outdoors adversely affects many remote-based image processing and computer vision systems, because of severe color casts, low contrast, and poor visibility of sand-dust images. In such cases, conventional color correction methods do not guarantee appropriate performance in outdoor computer vision applications. In this paper, we present a novel color correction and dehazing algorithm for sand-dust image enhancement. First, we propose an effective color correction method that preserves the consistency of the chromatic variances and maintains the coincidence of the chromatic means. Next, a transmission map for image dehazing is estimated using the gamma correction for the enhancement of color-corrected sand-dust images. Finally, a cross-correlation-based chromatic histogram shift algorithm is proposed to reduce the reddish artifacts in the enhanced images. We performed extensive experiments for various sand-dust images and compared the performance of the proposed method to that of several existing state-of-the-art enhancement methods. The simulation results indicated that the proposed enhancement scheme outperforms the existing approaches in terms of both subjective and objective qualities.
Keywords: chromatic variance consistency; color correction; cross-correlation; dehazing; gamma correction; sand-dust image enhancement.