Efficient cultural heritage image restoration with nonuniform illumination enhancement
Marwa Jmal, Wided Souidene Mseddi, Rabah Attia · Journal of Electronic Imaging · 2017
Cultural heritage digitization has been of research interest for several decades. For such, the quality of the stored images should be pleasant to see. However, as images captured by digital devices may include undesirable effects, conducting an enhancement on the image is essential. In this context, we present a framework for the purpose of cultural heritage image illumination enhancement. First, a mapping curve based on saturation feedback is created to adjust the contrast. Then illumination is enhanced by applying a modified homomorphic filter in the frequency domain. The technique employs an optimization search process based on the efficient golden section search algorithm to compute the optimal parameters to produce the enhanced image. Finally, a color restoration function is applied to overcome the problem of color violation. The resulted image represents a trade-off among local contrast improvement, detail enhancement, and preserving the naturalness of the image. Experiments are conducted on a collected dataset of cultural heritage images and compared to some of the state-of-the-art image enhancement methods using a set of quantitative assessments criteria. Results have shown that our proposed approach is able to accomplish a wide set of the performance goals.