Special issue on real-time color image processing

Abstract

Color perception plays an important role in object recognition and scene understanding both for humans and intelligent vision systems. Recent advances in digital color imaging and computer hardware technology have led to an explosion in the use of color images in a variety of applications including medical imaging, content-based image retrieval, biometrics, watermarking, digital inpainting, remote sensing, visual quality inspection, among many others. As a result, automated processing and analysis of color images has become an active area of research, which is witnessed by the large number of publications during the past two decades. The multivariate nature of color image data presents new challenges for researchers and practitioners as the numerous methods developed for singlechannel images are often not directly applicable to multichannel images. In addition, common scalar image processing operations often become computationally intractable when performed in high-dimensional spaces. As a result, the development of computationally practical methods for color image processing has become an important research area. The goals of this special issue are to summarize the state-of-the-art in real-time color image processing and to provide future directions for this exciting subfield of image processing. The intended audience includes researchers and professionals, who are increasingly dealing with the processing and analysis of color images and video. The special issue opens with ‘‘Design of a Shift-andAdd Based Hardware Accelerator for Color Space Conversion’’ by Li et al. The authors propose a hardware/software co-design architecture for Nios II, a 32-bit embedded processor. The architecture integrates a pipelined color space converter hardware accelerator based on a genetic algorithm and an LCD touch module. When implemented on a system-on-a-programmable-chip, the proposed architecture is capable of converting a 512 512 RGB image to YCbCr in 0:11 s. The special issue continues with seven articles on color image enhancement. In ‘‘A Simple Gray-Edge Automatic White Balance Method with FPGA Implementation,’’ Tan et al. propose a real-time automatic white balance method based on the gray-edge hypothesis. To reduce computational time, the method employs horizontal downsampling using the mean filter and gradient computation using horizontal first-order difference operator. The authors demonstrate the practicality of their approach using an FPGA implementation. In ‘‘A Full Linear 3 3 Color Correction between Images,’’ Lecca describes a fast color correction algorithm that is capable of equalizing the colors of two images of the same scene that are acquired under different illuminants and/or by different devices. The author demonstrates the performance of her approach against two state-of-the-art approaches on a variety of synthetic and real-world image databases. The method has linear time complexity in the M. E. Celebi (&) Department of Computer Science, Louisiana State University, Shreveport, LA, USA e-mail: ecelebi@lsus.edu