Design of a Digital Architecture for Real-Time Video, Enhancement Based on Illuminance-Reflectance Model

A design of a high performance digital architecture for a nonlinear image enhancement technique is presented in this paper. The image enhancement is based on illuminance-reflectance model which improves the visual quality of digital images and video captured under insufficient or non-uniform lighting conditions [1]. Systolic, pipelined and parallel design techniques are utilized effectively in the proposed FPGA-based architectural design to achieve real-time performance. Estimation and folding techniques are used in the hardware algorithmic design to achieve faster, simpler and more efficient architecture. The video enhancement system is implemented using Xilinx´s multimedia development board that contains a VirtexII-X2000 FPGA and it is capable of processing approximately 66 Mega-pixels (Mpixels) per second.