Fast natural color mapping for night-time imagery
article
We present a new method to render multi-band night-time imagery (images from sensors whose sensitive range does not necessarily coincide with the visual part of the electromagnetic spectrum, e.g. image intensifiers, thermal camera's) in natural daytime colors. The color mapping is derived from the combination of a multi-band image and a corresponding natural color daytime reference image. The mapping optimizes the match between the multi-band image and the reference image, and yields a nightvision image with a natural daytime color appearance. The lookup-table based mapping procedure is extremely simple and fast and provides object color constancy. Once it has been derived the color mapping can be deployed in real-time to different multi-band image sequences of similar scenes. Displaying night-time imagery in natural colors may help human observers to process this type of imagery faster and better, thereby improving situational awareness and reducing detection and recognition times. © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Topics
Color mappingFalse colorImage fusionNightvisionColor appearanceColor mappingElectromagnetic spectraFalse colorHuman observersImage intensifiersLook up tableMulti-band imagesMultibandNatural colorsNightvisionObject colorsReference imageSituational awarenessThermal cameraColorColor printingMappingTable lookupImage fusion
TNO Identifier
281691
ISSN
15662535
Source
Information Fusion, 11(2), pp. 69-77.
Pages
69-77
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