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http://dx.doi.org/10.3837/tiis.2019.10.016

A Comprehensive and Practical Image Enhancement Method  

Wu, Fanglong (Faculty of Information Engineering and Automation, Kunming University of Science and Technology)
Liu, Cuiyin (Faculty of Information Engineering and Automation, Kunming University of Science and Technology)
Publication Information
KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS) / v.13, no.10, 2019 , pp. 5112-5129 More about this Journal
Abstract
Image enhancement is a challenging problem in the field of image processing, especially low-light color images enhancement. This paper proposed a robust and comprehensive enhancement method based several points. First, the idea of bright channel is introduced to estimate the illumination map which is used to attain the enhancing result with Retinex model, and the color constancy is keep as well. Second, in order eliminate the illumination offsets wrongly estimated, morphological closing operation is used to modify the initial estimating illumination. Furthermore, in order to avoid fabricating edges, enlarged noises and over-smoothed visual features appearing in enhancing result, a multi-scale closing operation is used. At last, in order to avoiding the haloes and artifacts presented in enhancing result caused by gradient information lost in previous step, guided filtering is introduced to deal with previous result with guided image is initial bright channel. The proposed method can get good illumination map, and attain very effective enhancing results, including dark area is enhanced with more visual features, color natural and constancy, avoiding artifacts and over-enhanced, and eliminating Incorrect light offsets.
Keywords
Image enhancement; bright channel; morphological operation; multi-scale fusion; guided filter;
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