Dr. Vijayan Asari received another patent - Visibility improvement in color video stream

The U.S. Patent office has awarded a patent for the development of a new technology in video enhancement.

The patented technology, titled "Visibility Improvement in Color Video Stream" is the outcome of one of the research activities at Old Dominion University's Vision Lab by me  and Li Tao who was a graduate student in Vision Lab when the application was filed in 2005. Tao graduated in 2006 with a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering and is currently working as a Senior Scientist at Samsung Technologies, Irvine California. This patent was awarded on September 23, 2008.

This patented technology is based on an integrated neighborhood dependent nonlinear approach for the enhancement of color images captured in various environments such as extremely low lighting, fog or locations that are underwater. The enhancement methodology consists of a luminance enhancement process and a contrast enhancement process. Luminance enhancement is a process of dynamic range compression  which essentially performs an intensity transformation based on a specifically designed nonlinear transfer function. This process largely increases the luminance for dark regions of the image but only slightly changes the luminance for the bright regions of the image. Contrast enhancement transforms the intensity level of each pixel based on the relationship between the pixel and its surrounding pixels. The output of contrast enhancement is a power function of the luminance of the input image. The exponent of the power function is determined by the information obtained in the original luminance image, which is the ratio between the result of neighborhood averaging and the luminance of the center pixel. After contrast enhancement, the luminance image is converted back to a color image through a linear color restoration process with color saturation and hue adjustment.

This is an amazing enhancement technique which can produce clear visibility in video streams. The most important factor is that this enhancement process is faster  when compared to other state of the art technologies and the enhancement can be performed in real time.

I received a US patent titled "Color Image Characterization, Enhancement and Balancing," which was awarded on April 22, 2008 for the outstanding research work done at Vision Lab with Ming-Jung Seow who was a graduate student in Vision Lab. Seow graduated in 2006 with a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering and currently works as a Senior Scientist at Behavioral Recognition Systems (BRS) Labs in Houston.

These technologies could be extremely useful for defense and homeland security applications such as night-time surveillance and object recognition in low lighting conditions. In addition to image and video enhancement technologies, Vision Lab is currently involved in several homeland security and defense related research projects. Brief descriptions of the research projects in Vision Lab can be seen at the laboratory website: http://eng.odu.edu/visionlab/.

Vision Lab and Frank Reidy Research Center for Bioelectrics are getting $1.6M from Department of Defense's 2009 fiscal year budget appropriation to study new ways for the U.S. military to minimize casualties and deal with them more successfully when they do occur.