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Foggy images suffer from low contrast and poor visibility problem along with little color information of the scene. It is imperative to remove fog from images as a pre-processing step in computer vision. The Dark Channel Prior (DCP) technique is a very promising defogging technique due to excellent restoring results for images containing no homogeneous region. However, having a large homogeneous region such as sky region, the restored images suffer from color distortion and block effects. Thus, to overcome the limitation of DCP method, we introduce a framework which is based on sky and non-sky region segmentation and restoring sky and non-sky parts separately. Here, isolation of the sky and non-sky part is done by using a binary mask formulated by floodfill algorithm. The foggy sky part is restored by using Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) and non-sky part by modified DCP. The restored parts are blended together for the resultant image. The proposed method is evaluated using both synthetic and real world foggy images against state of the art techniques. The experimental result shows that our proposed method provides better entropy value than other stated techniques along with have better natural visual effects while consuming much lower processing time.

Recognition of handwritten Bangla characters has drawn considerable attention recently. The Bangla language is rich with characters of various styles such as numerals, basic characters, and compound and modifier characters. The inherent variation in individual writing styles, along with the complex, cursive nature of characters, makes the recognition task more challenging. To compare the outcomes of handwritten Bangla character recognition, this study considers two different approaches. The first one is classifier-based, where a hybrid model of the feature extraction technique extracts the features and a multiclass support vector machine (SVM) performs the recognition. The second one is based on a convolution neural network (CNN). For recognition, we considered 10 Bangla numerals, 50 basic characters, and a subset of compound characters that are frequently used in the Bangla language. Experimental results demonstrate that the CNN model outperforms the traditional classifier-based approach, obtaining 98.04%, 99.68%, and 98.18% recognition accuracy for Bangla basic characters, numerals, and the subset of compound characters, respectively.

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