DWT based historical image enhancement technique using adaptive gamma correction

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Jyoti Swarup, Indu Sreedevi

Abstract

Historical Images are of great significance as they depict the social and cultural heritage of a country. The sculptures and murals have a unique way of expressing age-old traditions and diversities of art that existed for many centuries. Digital restoration of historical images may undergo several defects of low intensity lighting conditions, blurred and occluded images. Their preservation and reconstruction of damaged images are of prime importance. In this paper, an algorithm is proposed to enhance the image quality of digitally captured images of historical importance to illustrate the art and other image details clearly.  In the CIELAB color space model, discrete wavelet transform is applied up to two levels to obtain approximation and detail coefficient bands. Based on these sub-bands, gamma correction is applied adaptively to brighten the features of dark and dull images. Experimental results and evaluation parameters exhibit the efficiency of the proposed method. The proposed algorithm can be used efficiently for image acquisition to obtain enhanced images. The proposed algorithm is suitable for real-time applications and can be easily adapted to devices that support limited memory with predefined operations.

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Articles