Technique Developed by IIT Madras to reduce Haze in Surveillance Camera Images
One of the biggest drawbacks of surveillance cameras is that their footage or image is produced with some noise and haze. IIT Madras researchers come up with a technique called "enhanced image processing" technique to combat this drawback. This technique will reduce haze of images captured by Surveillance Cameras. This technique will help law enforcement agencies in solving crimes and will also help common public as nowadays a lot of people have CCTVs to ensure their safety.
CCTV camera is a great tool as they provide us evidence of a crime, but foggy and hazy days impact the quality of the footage. The visibility on such days becomes very less that captured image is hard to process and render. To combat this issue, team of IIT Madras team led by Prof. A.N. Rajagopalan, Institute Chair Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Madras came up with this approach to reduce haze in images.
Research elaborated by Prof. A.N. Rajagopalan:
"Most computer vision applications including surveillance, terrain classification and autonomous navigation, among others, require high quality pictures and haze can severely undermine performance, 'Image de-hazing' is beneficial even in personal and public transportation systems. Reducing the effect of haze is a very challenging problem, more so when only a single observation of the scene is available."
"Now that we have a process in place which can yield
almost haze-free images, surveillance can be done in a better way especially in winters or in mountainous regions. After this successful research, we are looking at addressing heavy haze and other adverse weather conditions."
The quality of image captured by camera can be affected by particles in the atmosphere. The light first falls on object and a little amount of it gets absorbed by the object itself, and then it gets reflected back. The medium between the camera and the object can cause a decrease in amount of light reaching camera. This medium is the ambient light reflected in atmosphere which gets added to the light reflected from the object and produces a hazy image. This results in bad quality of image. IIT Madras team devised a post-processing technique to reduce the hazy effect.