Scene recovery: Combining visual enhancement and resolution improvement

Abstract

Visibility enhancement of outdoor images under complex imaging conditions has been a crucial task for computer vision and received growing attention. However, existing image enhancement methods could result in typical block-like artifacts or color distortion. The undesirable impurities might also be significantly magnified after the enhancement task, further reducing the image quality. For enhancing and super-resolving complex real-world degradation, we propose a simultaneous visual enhancement and resolution improvement (VERI) variational scene recovery model for jointly enhancing image visibility and improving the resolution of the degraded image. Particularly, we estimate the scattering light map for degradation images to achieve clean scene radiance and simultaneously seek a high-quality image through a deep super-resolution network. The semi-proximal alternating direction method of multipliers (sPADMM) algorithm is employed for efficiently solving the minimization problems in the proposed model. Extensive experiments illustrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method in dealing with various scenes, such as haze, sandstorm, underwater or low illumination.