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Illumination-based nighttime video contrast enhancement using genetic algorithm

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Abstract

Contrast enhancement is crucial to the domain of security and surveillance where limitations in dynamic range and lack of lighting sources prevent fine details of the scene from being captured. Here, we propose a method of nighttime video contrast enhancement based on genetic algorithms. Conversion from RGB to HSI and illumination component extraction were done firstly. Illumination-based enhancement which combines chromosome, corresponding operators and genetic algorithm was then applied to enhance the contrast and details of the video according to an objective fitness criterion. Image reconstruction followed previous procedures finally. Comparison of our proposed method with other automatic enhancement techniques such as histogram equalization shows that our method produces natural looking images/videos, especially when the dynamic range of the input image is high. Results obtained, both in terms of subjective and objective evaluation, show the superiority of the proposed method.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. This work is partly supported by Xuzhou Institute of Technology program in 2011 (Grant no. XKY2011218), Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant no. 1600-852013), and National High-Tech Program 863 of China (Grant nos. 2007AA010407 and 2009GZ0017).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Engineering, Universtiy of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan, People’s Republic of China

    Yunbo Rao & Leiting Chen

  2. Department of Information and Electrical Engineering, Xuzhou Institute of Technology, Xuzhou, Jiangsu, People’s Republic of China

    Lei Hou

  3. Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, Liaoning, China

    Zhihui Wang

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  1. Yunbo Rao
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  2. Lei Hou
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  3. Zhihui Wang
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  4. Leiting Chen
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Correspondence to Yunbo Rao.

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Rao, Y., Hou, L., Wang, Z. et al. Illumination-based nighttime video contrast enhancement using genetic algorithm. Multimed Tools Appl 70, 2235–2254 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-012-1226-6

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