A Hardware-Oriented Contrast Enhancement Algorithm for Real-Time Applications

Recently, intelligent automobile electronics, advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) and intelligent transport system (ITS) have become to make great strides towards to the goal of automatic driving and smart cities. Therefore, how to enhance the visibility no matter at night or excessive exposure turns into an important issue of the research. In this paper, a novel effective contrast enhancement and hardware-oriented algorithm is proposed. The proposed contrast enhancement algorithm includes a RGB to HSV module, a mirror expansion module, a weighted filter and a Gamma correction module. A new technique called weighted filter was used to pick up the best brightness factor for the proposed algorithm. To be suitable for VLSI implementation, the proposed algorithm was developed based on low-complexity and low-memory-requirement. Compared with previous studies, this work proposed a high quality and low complexity hardware-oriented contrast enhancement algorithm for VLSI implementation.