FPGA Based Non Uniform Illumination Correction in Image Processing Applications

This paper outlines, an efficient FPGA based hardware design for enhancement of color and grey scale images in image and video processing. The approach used is adaptive histogram equalization which works very effectively for images captured under extremely dark environment as well as non-uniform lighting environment where bright regions are kept unaffected and dark objects in bright background. To meet the speed and area constraints, it is important to quantify the reduction in processing speed as well as FPGA resources that can be achieved if a component of the image/video processing system is embedded onto a hardware based platform like an FPGA. A flexible field programmable gate array device lets develop the image processing application so that the same logic substrate is reconfigured and reused by several custom coprocessors during the different operation stages of the sequential biometric algorithm. The results obtained with this technology reveal that a reconfigurable FPGA faces both real-time and parallel compute-intensive demands of the image enhancement process.