Underwater range-gated laser imaging (URGLI) still has some problems like un-uniform light, low brightness and contrast. To solve the problems, a variant of adaptive histogram equalization called contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) is proposed in this paper. In experiment, using the CLAHE and HE to enhance the images, and evaluate the quality of enhanced images by peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and contrast. The result shows that the HE gets the images over-enhanced, while the CLAHE has a good enhancement with compressing the over-enhancement and the influence of un-uniform light. The experimental results demonstrate that the CLAHE has a good result of image enhancement for target detection by underwater range-gated laser imaging system.

Date Published: 31 October 2016
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 10020, Optoelectronic Imaging and Multimedia Technology IV, 1002015 (31 October 2016); doi: 10.1117/12.2246033

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 10020:
Optoelectronic Imaging and Multimedia Technology IV
Qionghai Dai; Tsutomu Shimura, Editor(s)