Systems and methods for detecting, characterizing, and addressing surgical smoke are disclosed. In some embodiments, a surgical system receives image data representing an image of a surgical environment and generates sets of values based on the received image. The sets of values may include representations of atmospheric light in the image and representations of contrast values in the image. The system may determine from the sets of values whether predetermined smoke severity criteria are met, and may responsively automatically engage and/or disengage one or more surgical devices, such as a surgical smoke evacuation system and/or an image processing system (e.g., a video enhancement feature) configured to improve quality of smoky surgical images.