TTV Regularized LRTA Technique for the Estimation of Haze Model Parameters in Video Dehazing

Abstract

Nowadays, intelligent transport systems have a major role in providing a safe and secure traffic society for passengers, pedestrians, and vehicles. However, some bad weather conditions such as haze or fog may affect the visual clarity of video footage captured by the camera. This will cause a malfunction in further video processing algorithms performed by such automated systems. This article proposes an efficient technique for estimating the atmospheric light and the transmission map in the haze model entirely in tensor domain for video dehazing. In this work, the atmospheric light is appraised using the Mie scattering principle of visible light and the temporal coherency among the frames is achieved by means of tensor algebra. Furthermore, the transmission map is computed using Low Rank Tensor Approximation (LRTA) based on Weighted Tensor Nuclear Norm (WTNN) minimization and Tensor Total Variation (TTV) regularization. WTNN minimization is used to smooth the coarse transmission map, and TTV regularization is employed to maintain spatio-temporal continuity by preserving the details of salient structures and edges. The novelty of the proposed model is confined in the efficient formulation of a unified optimization model for the estimation of transmission map and atmospheric light in the tensor domain with fine-tuned regularization terms, which is not reported till now in the direction of video dehazing. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in video dehazing.