An integrated enhancement method to improve image visibility and remove color cast for sand-dust image

Sand-dust color images suffer from poor image visibility and serious color cast that significantly affect the performance of outdoor computer vision systems. Therefore, this paper proposes an integrated enhancement method for the sand-dust image. The proposed method improves the image visibility and removes the sand-dust color cast. It integrates two main processes in two different color models. The adaptive gray world-blue channel (AGW-B) is utilized in the Red-Green-Blue (RGB) color model to remove the sand-dust color cast. Then, the contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization with normalized intensity and saturation correction (CLAHE-NISC) is conducted in a Hue-Saturation-Intensity (HSI) color model to enhance the image visibility. Sand-dust images with weak, medium, and extreme sand-dust color casts were utilized in the subjective and objective evaluations. Results show that the proposed method produced better and clearer enhanced images than the other four current sand-dust image enhancement methods.