Awareness and understanding of atmospheric visibility has strong implications for our
daily lives. In addition to being critical for navigation, it acts as an indicator for air quality
and pollution. The devices traditionally used to measure visibility, transmissometers
and nephelometers, are expensive and often require field maintenance and calibration.
Visibility camera systems are increasingly being deployed to measure atmospheric visibility;
however, their use has so far been limited to qualitative analysis. The primary
focus of this study is to develop image analysis techniques to derive quantitative measurements
of visibility from such camera systems. We take advantage of the Beer-Lambert
law, which defines the exponential relation by which light is attenuated when traveling
through a medium. This is used to define a standard visibility model, which then allows
us to frame the problem as a simple log-linear relation. We investigate several numerical
models to estimate visibility, including single and multivariate linear least square
regression, Laplacian-regularized linear least squares regression, and approximation with
the M5' linear regression tree algorithm. We demonstrate the effectiveness of these algorithms
on images and ground truth visibility measurements from the PhoenixVis.net
visibility camera system. The features chosen by the multivariate feature selection process
provide insight into the benefit of edge contrast and color saturation as indicators
for poor visibility. In addition, we investigate Lambertian lighting and a dark channel
prior as cues for salient regions for visibility estimation.