Restoration of degraded images using stereo vision

Image restoration consists in retrieving an original image by processing captured images of a scene which are degraded by noise, blurring or optical scattering. Commonly restoration algorithms utilize a single monocular image of the observed scene by assuming a known degradation model. In this approach, valuable information of the three dimensional scene is discarded. This work presents a locally-adaptive algorithm for image restoration by employing stereo vision. The proposed algorithm utilizes information of a three-dimensional scene as well as local image statistics to improve the quality of a single restored image by processing pairs of stereo images. Computer simulations results obtained with the proposed algorithm are analyzed and discussed in terms of objective metrics by processing stereo images degraded by optical scattering.