Oct 28 2013
Sabine Süsstrunk, IC professor for Image and Visual Representation (IVRG), received a Best (Open) Paper Award for the publication "Near-Infrared Guided Color Image Dehazing", co-authored with Chen Feng, Shaojie Zhuo, Xiaopeng Zhang, and Liang Shen, at the IEEE 20th International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP).
The paper, which resulted from Sabine's collaboration with Qualcomm, Toronto, Canada, describes a powerful image dehazing method that takes advantage of near-infrared (NIR) information. Due to its longer wavelengths, NIR is less scattered by particles in the air than visible light. NIR images thus unveil more details of distant objects in landscape photographs. The authors propose a much improved image dehazing scheme using pairs of color and NIR images, which effectively estimates the airlight color and transfers details from the NIR. The results are natural looking photographs that reveal much more detail in distant objects than is possible with visible light only.
The IEEE 20th International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) was held in Melbourne, Australia, September 15-18, 2013. Sponsored by the IEEE Signal Processing Society, ICIP is the premier forum for the presentation of technological advances and research results in the fields of theoretical, experimental, and applied image and video processing. In 2013, 2200 papers were submitted.