A novel enhancement method for low illumination images based on microarray camera

It is difficult but important to get clear information from the low illumination images. In recent years the research of the low illumination image enhancement has become a hot topic in image processing and computer vision. The Retinex algorithm is one of the most popular methods in the field and uniform illumination is necessary to enhance low illumination image quality by using this algorithm. However, for the different areas of an image with contrast brightness differences, the illumination image is not smooth and causes halo artifacts so that it cannot retain the detail information of the original images. To solve the problem, we generalize the multi-scale Retinex algorithm and propose a new enhancement method for the low illumination images based on the microarray camera. The proposed method can well make up for the deficiency of imbalanced illumination and significantly inhibit the halo artifacts as well. Experimental results show that the proposed method can get better image enhancement effect compared to the multi-scale Retinex algorithm of a single image enhancement. Advantages of the method also include that it can significantly inhibit the halo artifacts and thus retain the details of the original images, it can improve the brightness and contrast of the image as well. The newly developed method in this paper has application potential to the images captured by pad and cell phone in the low illumination environment.