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Recognizing the model of a vehicle in natural scene images is an important and challenging task for real-life applications. Current methods perform well under controlled conditions, such as frontal and horizontal view-angles or under optimal lighting conditions. Nevertheless, their performance decreases significantly in an unconstrained environment, that may include extreme darkness or over illuminated conditions. Other challenges to recognition systems include input images displaying very low visual quality or considerably low exposure levels. This paper strives to improve vehicle model recognition accuracy in dark scenes by using a deep neural network model. To boost the recognition performance of vehicle models, the approach performs joint enhancement and localization of vehicles for non-uniform-lighting conditions. Experimental results on several public datasets demonstrate the generality and robustness of our framework. It improves vehicle detection rate under poor lighting conditions, localizes objects of interest, and yields better vehicle model recognition accuracy on low-quality input image data. Grants: This work is supported by the US Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), grant contract: 693JJ320C000023 Keywords—Image enhancement, vehicle model and 

Abstract—Current state-of-the-art object tracking methods have largely benefited from the public availability of numerous benchmark datasets. However, the focus has been on open-air imagery and much less on underwater visual data. Inherent underwater distortions, such as color loss, poor contrast, and underexposure, caused by attenuation of light, refraction, and scattering, greatly affect the visual quality of underwater data, and as such, existing open-air trackers perform less efficiently on such data. To help bridge this gap, this article proposes a first comprehensive underwater object tracking (UOT100) benchmark dataset to facilitate the development of tracking algorithms well-suited for underwater environments. The proposed dataset consists of 104 underwater video sequences and more than 74 000 annotated frames derived from both natural and artificial underwater videos, with great varieties of distortions. We benchmark the performance of 20 state-of-the-art object tracking algorithms and further introduce a cascaded residual network for underwater image enhancement model to improve tracking accuracy and success rate of trackers. Our experimental results demonstrate the shortcomings of existing tracking algorithms on underwater data and how our generative adversarial network (GAN)-based enhancement model can be used to improve tracking performance. We also evaluate the visual quality of our model’s output against existing GAN-based methods using well-accepted quality metrics and demonstrate that our model yields better visual data. Index Terms—Underwater benchmark dataset, underwater generative adversarial network (GAN), underwater image enhancement (UIE), underwater object tracking (UOT).