Adaptive Image Enhancement Based on Guide Image and Fraction-Power Transformation for Wireless Capsule Endoscopy

Good image quality of the wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) is the key for doctors to diagnose gastrointestinal (GI) tract diseases. However, the poor illumination, limited performance of the camera in WCE, and complex environment in the GI tract usually result in low-quality endoscopic images. Existing image enhancement methods only use the information of the image itself or multiple images of the same scene to accomplish the enhancement. In this paper, we propose an adaptive image enhancement method based on guide image and fraction-power transformation. First, intensities of endoscopic images are analyzed to assess the illumination conditions. Second, images captured under poor illumination conditions are enhanced by a brand-new image enhancement method called adaptive guide image based enhancement (AGIE). AGIE enhances low-quality images by using the information of a good quality image of the similar scene. Otherwise, images are enhanced by the proposed adaptive fraction-power transformation. Experimental results show that the proposed method improves the average intensity of endoscopic images by 64.20% and the average local entropy by 31.25%, which outperforms the state-of-art methods.