A Sand-Dust Degraded Image Enhancement Algorithm Based on Color Correction and Information Loss Constraints

The outdoor images captured in sand storm environment have serious color cast, low contrast and low quality problem. In order to solve these problems, a sand-dust degraded image enhancement method based on color correction and information loss constraints is proposed, which mainly contains two modules, i.e. color correction and contrast enhancement. In the color correction module, by analyzing the RGB histograms distribution characteristics of the sand-dust degraded images, a Gaussian model based improved color correction algorithm is designed to adjust the color of the image. In the contrast enhancement module, by combining the information loss constraints method with the dark channel prior based method, an atmospheric scattering model based contrast enhancement algorithm is put forward to enhance the sand-dust degraded images. In order to verify the effectiveness of our algorithm, lots of experiments are carried out and compared with 4 existing methods. It is easy to see that our method not only effectively strengthens the contrast of different kinds of sand-dust degraded images, but also avoids the color casting phenomena and takes on good color fidelity and proper brightness.