Enhancement of fog degraded images using empirical mode decomposition

Images can have poor visibility, contrast and colors in foggy weather conditions. Therefore it is required to enhance visual quality of the fog-degraded images. In this paper we present a new method based on an Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) for fog-degraded image enhancement. Initially each spectral component of the fog-degraded image is decomposed into Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) using EMD. Then the enhanced image is constructed by combining the IMFs of spectral channels with optimum weights in order to obtain an enhanced image with increased visual quality. The optimal weight estimation process is carried out automatically using genetic algorithm. Eventually, image enhancement is completed performing color correction followed by a de-quantization.