TY - JOUR
T1 - Enhancement of low illumination images based on an optimal hyperbolic tangent profile
AU - Liu, San Chi
AU - Liu, Shilong
AU - Wu, Hongkun
AU - Rahman, Md Arifur
AU - Lin, Stephen Ching-Feng
AU - Wong, Chin Yeow
AU - Kwok, Ngaiming
AU - Shi, Haiyan
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - Contrast enhancement is a critical pre-processing stage for many image based applications. It is frequently encountered that the illumination condition, while capturing the image, is imperfect. Specific algorithms have to be applied to restore these images from, for instance, the degradation due to low illumination. An adaptive enhancement method is developed here that tackles the image quality enhancement problem from an optimization perspective. In particular, the input image intensity is mapped to the output based on a weighted hybrid of a hyperbolic tangent and a linear profile. The mapping parameters are optimized, with regard to maximizing the image global entropy, by using the Golden Section Search algorithm for its implementation efficiency. Moreover, user interventions are not necessary. Better qualitative and comparable quantitative performances are obtained from experiments, with regard to the increase of brightness, information content and suppression of unwanted artifacts, as compared to recent profile mapping based methods.
AB - Contrast enhancement is a critical pre-processing stage for many image based applications. It is frequently encountered that the illumination condition, while capturing the image, is imperfect. Specific algorithms have to be applied to restore these images from, for instance, the degradation due to low illumination. An adaptive enhancement method is developed here that tackles the image quality enhancement problem from an optimization perspective. In particular, the input image intensity is mapped to the output based on a weighted hybrid of a hyperbolic tangent and a linear profile. The mapping parameters are optimized, with regard to maximizing the image global entropy, by using the Golden Section Search algorithm for its implementation efficiency. Moreover, user interventions are not necessary. Better qualitative and comparable quantitative performances are obtained from experiments, with regard to the increase of brightness, information content and suppression of unwanted artifacts, as compared to recent profile mapping based methods.
UR - https://hdl.handle.net/1959.7/uws:64570
U2 - 10.1016/j.compeleceng.2017.08.026
DO - 10.1016/j.compeleceng.2017.08.026
M3 - Article
SN - 0045-7906
VL - 70
SP - 538
EP - 550
JO - Computers and Electrical Engineering
JF - Computers and Electrical Engineering
ER -