Quantification of retinex in enhancement of weather degraded images

The Images of outdoor scenes captured in bad weather suffer from poor contrast and color of images are drastically altered or degraded. It is imperative to remove weather effects from images in order to make vision systems more reliable. Also, there are often serious discrepancy existing between the images and the direct observation of the real scenes. Even with wide dynamic range imaging systems, the recorded images will not be seen same as real observation is because of its weaker dynamic range compression. The retinex is aimed to obtain the balance between the human vision and machine vision system along with color constancy. In this paper, MSRCR synthesizes dynamic range compression, color constancy, and color rendition and, thereby, approaches fidelity to direct observation to enhance the weather-degraded images. The paper also quantifies quality of MSR enhancement algorithm.