visIvis Evaluation of Vision based Visibility Measurement

In air traffic management (ATM) and monitoring of critical infrastructure, the exact description of the atmospheric state and thus the visibility is an indispensable basis for any further weather forecast. In order to overcome the drawbacks of the currently subjective reports from human observers, we present ”visIvis”, an innovative solution to automatically derive visibility measures from standard cameras by a vision-based approach. Several research aims already target camerabased visibility estimation. E.g. the weather services of the Netherlands (KNMI [3]) rely on a few manually selected landmarks with known distances to derive the prevailing visibility. A variety of approaches uses physicsbased models to derive a visibility measure (e.g. Koschmieder model or other measures of contrast [1] as well as models of light extinction [2]).