• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.10 no.3
• /
• pp.1233-1243
• /
• 2015

The contrast enhancement is great challenge in the image processing when images are suffering from poor contrast problem. Therefore, in order to overcome this problem an automatic method is proposed for contrast enhancement of natural color images. The proposed method consist of two stages: in first stage lightness component in YIQ color space is normalized by sigmoid function after the adaptive histogram equalization is applied on Y component and in second stage automatic color contrast enhancement algorithm is applied on output of the first stage. The proposed algorithm is tested on different NASA color images, hyperspectral color images and other types of natural color images. The performance of proposed algorithm is evaluated and compared with the other existing contrast enhancement algorithms in terms of colorfulness metric and color enhancement factor. The higher values of colorfulness metric and color enhancement factor imply that the visual quality of the enhanced image is good. Simulation results demonstrate that proposed algorithm provides higher values of colorfulness metric and color enhancement factor as compared to other existing contrast enhancement algorithms. The proposed algorithm also provides better visual enhancement results as compared with the other existing contrast enhancement algorithms.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
• /
• v.21 no.3
• /
• pp.211-216
• /
• 2012

Fires are the most common disaster and early fire detection is of great importance to minimize the consequent damage. Simple sensors including smoke detectors are widely used for the purpose but they are able to sense fires only at close proximity. Recently, due to the rapid advances of relevant technologies, vision-based fire sensing has attracted growing attention. In this paper, a novel visual sensing technique to automatically detect fire is presented. The proposed technique consists of multiple steps of image processing: pixel-level, block-level, and frame level. At the first step, fire flame pixel candidates are selected based on their color values in YIQ space from the image of a camera which is installed as a vision sensor at a fire scene. At the second step, the dynamic parts of flames are extracted by comparing two consecutive images. These parts are then represented in regularly divided image blocks to reduce pixel-level detection error and simplify following processing. Finally, the temporal change of the detected blocks is analyzed to confirm the spread of fire. The proposed technique was tested using real fire images and it worked quite reliably.