improvement of the contrast, but also makes color
recovering feasible.
Measuring the quality enhancement applied to an
image after enhancement process is often very
difficult to accomplish. So far applies to subjective
evaluation criteria of improvement in the image. In
literature some objective metrics that aim at
estimating the brightness and contrast of the image,
such as Entropy (H), Absolute Mean Brightness Error
(AMBE) and Enhancement Measure (EME). The use
of the values of these metrics need certain care, since
it does not necessarily correlate improved quality in
terms of contrast enhancement (Schettini et al., 2010).
Analyzing the values of these metrics for image 8
of Table 1, the values of H indicate better occupation
of all intensity levels in the histogram. This is
associated with a visually pleasing image, positive
considering the balanced conditions of image
acquisition. The values of this metric for that image
are 6.9384, 7.6334, 6.8803 and 7.3561. Representing
the result of the original image, the proposed method,
the method of (Schettini et al., 2010) and of (Iqbal et
al. 2007), respectively. It is noteworthy that in this
case, the highest value of Entropy in fact represented
a nice image. However, it does not always happen in
other cases. Analogous behavior is found in the study
of (Schettini et al., 2010).
The AMBE is the average distance from the
original brightness, i.e., the difference in the average
intensity level of the gray scale, and new original
image. In a procedure improvement, if not always
aims to preserve the original brightness of the scene,
given the problems of uniformity of illumination.
(Schettini et al., 2010) states that preserve the original
brightness does not always mean preserve the natural
appearance of the image. Additionally, the original
images are strongly underexposed and/or
overexposed, we expect a high value AMBE,
indicating that the quality could be improved. For
example, the steps resulting from the applied
illumination correction and contrast enhancement of
the image 1, shown in Table 1, obtains a correction
value AMBE equals to 49.52. On the other hand, in a
correct exposure images or pictures obtained in dark
scenes (overnight), it is expected that our method
does not significantly alter the average brightness.
The metric values for image 2 of Table 1 with this
characteristic are, the proposed method equals 19.39,
AMBE (Schettini et al, 2010) equal to 20.46 and
AMBE (Iqbal et al, 2007) equal to 34.38.
The EME approximates an average contrast in the
image by dividing the image into no overlapping
blocks, defining a measure based on minimum and
maximum intensity values in each block and
averaging them. By this metric, high values should
indicate regions with high local contrast, while values
close to zero, should correspond to homogeneous
regions. If improvement method introduces noise in
such homogeneous regions, a higher value of EME
will be obtained, and possibly not correspond to an
improvement in image quality. As an example, the
values of this metric in image 10 of Table 1: Proposed
Method = 9.2414, Schettini method = 1.7403 and
Iqbal method = 5.4655. In this scenario values, on the
one hand, we can see that our method was the one
with the highest value; this is due mainly to the use of
CLAHE. Moreover, this value is not necessarily as a
negative factor which might compromise the quality
of the circumstantially improvement obtained.
6 CONCLUSIONS
This article presents a method of enhancement of
images degraded by natural phenomena which allows
the improvement of visibility from a single input
image without using any information of their training
model. The goal is to improve the visual quality of
distant objects on the scene. From the results, one can
notice that most of the intensity of degrading
phenomena are minimized, providing a better contrast
enhancement, brightness and color brightening
compared to other techniques. The authors found the
methodology promising for showing good results
with low computational cost and useful for their
application in various systems working in outdoor or
submerged environments.
When we compared the proposed solution with
other well-known method in the literature, we find a
correct increased dynamic range in both regions of
low and high brightness of an image, preventing the
common loss of quality due to artifacts, desaturation,
low luminance and grayish appearance. The Mean
Opinion Score (MOS) was used to evaluate the
performance of different contrast correction methods
of color images. The proposed method reached the
highest scores.
The method adequately performed in all three
different scenarios, especially when compared to
others. Its performance with images of underwater
environments, where the method achieved the higher
points, was especially interesting. However, in future
works, we intend to improve the algorithm optimizing
the parameter estimation values from the model of
image formation, such as attenuation and diffusion
coefficients that characterize the turbidity of scene
and depth of a given object in image.
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