Measuring Atmospheric Scattering from Digital Image Sequences

Current environmental monitoring devices are limited in their capability of measuring atmospheric particulate matter (PM) over large areas. Quantifying the visual degrading effects of atmospheric scattering in digital images of urban scenery and correlating these effects to PM levels is a vital step in more practically monitoring our environment. Currently, image haze removal (or dehazing) techniques exist which remove all the haze from a scene for the sole purpose of enhancing vision. This paper presents an extension to existing dehazing algorithms to use sequences of images captured over time and enforce a constant depth constraint. An experimental comparison of dehazing algorithms is then presented in the context of measuring atmospheric scattering and depth recovery using both simulation and depth measurements from real data.