Restoration of Deteriorated Images in Contrary Weather by Changing the Camera Direction

Removal of View-Disturbing Waterdrops in Images by Using a Pan-Tilt Camera System

Abstract

We propose a method for removing view-disturbing waterdrops from images by processing images taken with a pan-tilt camera system. Images that are taken on rainy days are often hard to make out due to adherent waterdrops on the surface of the protecting lens. In our method, a first image of a distant view is taken and then a second image is taken from a different angle. The new image is transformed with the projective transformation and compared with the first one to identify the regions with waterdrops. We can distinguish which image portion has waterdrops by considering the distance between two potential waterdrop regions. Finally, the region with waterdrops can be eliminated by merging two images. Experimental results showed the effectiveness of this method.