Visibility detection approach to road scene foggy images

Abstract

A cause of vehicle accidents is the reduced visibility due to bad weather conditions such as fog. Therefore, an onboard vision system should take visibility detection into account. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective approach for measuring the visibility distance using a single camera placed onboard a moving vehicle. The proposed algorithm is controlled by a few parameters and mainly includes camera parameter estimation, region of interest (ROI) estimation and visibility computation. Thanks to the ROI extraction, the position of the inflection point may be measured in practice. Thus, combined with the estimated camera parameters, the visibility distance of the input foggy image can be computed with a single camera and just the presence of road and sky in the scene. To assess the accuracy of the proposed approach, a reference target based visibility detection method is also introduced. The comparative study and quantitative evaluation show that the proposed method can obtain good visibility detection results with relatively fast speed.