LAUSR

The in-vehicle black box camera has become a popular device in many countries for security monitoring and event capture. However, the content of the video is often degraded by the reflection appear on the windshield. The reflection is produced by light and dust outside. We focus on this problem and attempt to improve the readability of video content by removing the undesired reflection layer from the nighttime onboard video. We firstly apply gradient prior and the characteristics of reflection to automatically detect the reflection regions; the reflections in these regions are then classified into the major and minor reflection. Next, we suppress the major reflections by reducing the gradient strength of the reflection layer. Based on the different distribution of gradient histograms between the background layer and the reflection layer, we construct the objective function to remove the major reflection residue and minor reflection. In the reflection removal process, we introduce luminance and chrominance fidelity terms into the objective function to maintain the brightness and chrominance of the background layer. Finally, we obtain a reflection removal result. Evaluation of removal experiments on nighttime onboard images shows that our proposed algorithm may successfully remove the reflection layer on the windshield in the nighttime onboard video.