Image Clarification Method Based on Structure-Texture Decomposition with Texture Refinement

This paper presents a high quality and low complexity image clarification method, which restores the visibility of images captured in bad weather and poor lighting conditions. A sequential processing of conventional dehazing and backlit correction methods has a problem that textures and noises are overemphasized by the corrections. The proposed method first decomposes a captured image into two components: a structure component forming smooth regions and strong edges and a rest component for fine textures and noises. Image enhancement is conducted based on analyses of the first component, while controlling an amplification factor of the texture component. The utilization of the structure component for the enhancement enables pixel-wise corrections without local area analysis which results in lower computational cost. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can successfully enhance image qualities and its computational cost is reasonable for real-time video processing.