Image enhancement using frame extraction through time

Abstract

Image enhancement within machine vision systems has been performed a variety of ways with the end goal of producing a better scene for further processing. The majority of approaches for enhancing an image scene and producing higher quality images have been explored employing only a single image. An alternate approach, yet to be fully explored, is the use of image sequences utilizing multiple image frames of information to generate an enhanced image for processing within a machine vision system. This paper describes a new approach to image enhancement for controlling lighting characteristics within an image called Frame Extraction Through Time (FETT). Using multiple image frames of data, FETT can be used to perform a number of lighting enhancement tasks such as scene normalization, nighttime traffic surveillance, and shadow removal for video conferencing systems. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008.