Mufti-band locally-adaptive contrast enhancement algorithm with built-in noise and artifact suppression mechanisms

摘要

For real-time imaging in surveillance applications, visibility of details is of primary importance to ensure customer confidence. Usually, image quality is improved by enhancing contrast and sharpness. Many complex scenes require local contrast improvements that should bring details to the best possible visibility. However, local enhancement methods mainly suffer from ringing artifacts and noise over-enhancement. In this paper, we present a new multi-window real-time high-frequency enhancement scheme, in which gain is a non-linear function of the detail energy. Our algorithm simultaneously controls perceived sharpness, ringing artifacts (contrast) and noise, resulting in a good balance between visibility of details and non-disturbance of artifacts. The overall quality enhancement is based on a careful selection of the filter types for the multi-band decomposition and a detailed analysis of the signal per frequency band. The advantage of the proposed technique is that detail gains can be set much higher than usual and the algorithm will reduce them only at places where it is really needed.