Patent ID: 8249303

Claim:
A fog image restoration apparatus for generating, from an original image picked up by a single image pickup device for picking up images, a restored image based on a fog model, an effect of fog being reduced from the restored image, the fog model expressing an effect of fog on a luminance level of each pixel constituting the original image, wherein the fog model is a fog model defined by the following equation: R=I·e β +A ·(1 −e β ) where R represents an intrinsic luminance of a target to be picked up by the single image pickup device, I represents observed luminance of the target picked-up by the image, A represents an intensity of airlight, and β represents an atmospheric extinction coefficient of indicative of a concentration of fog in an atmosphere, the fog image restoration apparatus comprising: a non-transitory computer-readable storage medium storing therein at least one executable program; and a processor connected to the memory to access the at least one executable program, the processor being configured, in accordance with the at least one executable program, to: separate the original image into a plurality of local blocks; and calculate the luminance R of each pixel by substituting the estimated intensity A of airlight, the observed luminance I of the target picked-up by the image pickup device, and the extinction coefficient β into the fog model for each of the separated local blocks, and generates the restoration image based on the luminance R.