Accelerating multi-scale retinex using ARM NEON

High dynamic range image processing have recently become an important topic in consumer electronics market. While multi-scale retinex with color restoration (MSRCR) have been well developed, disadvantages of low performance is not favorable to a mobile computer-vision system. To remedy the above problem, this paper proposes an accelerated MSRCR with effective use of ARM Cortex-A9 architecture and NEON SIMD technology. A linear sampling method with binomial normal approximation is developed for improving performance of Gaussian smoothing. Overall performance improvement of MSRCR algorithm on Zedboard platform is 74% compared to original ARM optimized C code compiled to Cortex-A9 processor architecture.