A Level-Conversion Method for Wide-Dynamic-Range Camera System

Abstract

A level-conversion method for wide-dynamic-range camera system called advanced contrast enhancement (ACE) has been developed. The wide-dynamic-range data is separated from the image's illumination and texture components, then the components are processed accordingly. Component separation is based on the human-vision mechanism and is done using hierarchical non-linear filtering. Experiments showed that ACE generates images with higher contrast and wider dynamic-range. Implementation of ACE in a general purpose camera system confirmed its effectiveness.