Color Enhancement in Images with Single CCD camera in Night Vision Environment

In this paper, we describe an effective method to enhance the color night images with spatio-temporal multi-scale retinex focused to the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) applications such as in the single CCD based Electronic Toll Collection System (ETCS). The basic spatial retinex is known to provide color constancy while effectively removing local shades. However, it is relatively ineffective in night vision enhancement. Our proposed method, STMSR, exploits the iterative time averaging of image sequences to suppress the noise in consideration of the moving vehicles in image frame. In the STMSR method, the spatial term makes the dark images distinguishable and preserves the color information day and night while the temporal term reduces the noise effect for sharper and clearer reconstruction of the contents in each image frame. We show through representative simulations that incorporating both terms in the modeling produces the output sequential images visually more pleasing than the original dim images.