Viewing Scenes Occluded by Smoke

In this paper, we focus on the problem of reconstructing images of scenes occluded by thick smoke. We propose a simple and effective algorithm that creates a single clear image of the scene given only a video sequence as input. Our method is based on two key observations. First, an increase in smoke density induces a decrease in both image contrast and color saturation. Measuring the decay of the high-frequency content in each video frame provides an effective way of quantifying the amount of contrast reduction. Secondly, the dynamic nature of the smoke causes the scene to be partially visible at times. By dividing the video sequence into subregions, our method is able to select the subregion-frame containing the least amount of smoke occlusion over time. Current experiments on different data sets show very promising results.