Recolorizing dark regions to enhance night surveillance video

Abstract

Security surveillance cameras are widely deployed to ensure secure banking, entertainment, and assisted living. Surveillance videos captured by these cameras are considered as forensic evidence for detecting crimes such as ATM robbery and vehicle theft. The videos captured under low lighting conditions are insufficient to identify a theft or robbery happened in the dark regions of a surveillance area. In this paper, we propose a recolorization based night video enhancement to increase the visual perception of surveillance videos. The day background illumination and tone adjusted night video frames are combined to reduce the darkness of the night video frame. Subsequently, chromatic colors of the day image regions are selected corresponding to the dark regions of night frame for the optimization based colorization by using white edge scribbles. The proposed algorithm significantly enhanced the perceptual quality of the video frames compared with existing algorithms. The no-reference based objective evaluation approaches are used for comparing and evaluating the performance of the proposed method with the existing methods. The experimental results indicated that the method improved the visual perception of the night surveillance video compared to the existing methods.