Interactive Deweathering of an Image using Physical Models

Abstract

Images of scenes acquired in bad weather have poor contrasts and colors. It is known that the degradation of image quality due to bad weather is exponential in the depths of the scene points. Therefore, restoring scene colors and contrasts from a single image of the scene is inherently under-constrained. Recently, it has been shown that multiple images of the same scene taken under different weather conditions or multiple images taken by varying imaging optics can be used to break the ambiguities in deweathering. In this paper, we address the question of deweathering a single image using simple additional information provided interactively by the user. We exploit the physics-based models described in prior work and develop three interactive algorithms to remove weather effects from, and add weather effects to, a single image. We demonstrate effective color and contrast restoration using several images taken under poor weather conditions. Furthermore, we show an example of adding weather effects to images. Our interactive methods for image (de)weathering can serve as easy-touse plug-ins for a variety of image processing software.