Low-Illumination Image Enhancement for Night-Time UAV Pedestrian Detection

To accomplish reliable pedestrian detection using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) under night-time conditions, an image enhancement method is developed in this article to improve the low-illumination image quality. First, the image brightness is mapped to a desirable level by a hyperbolic tangent curve. Second, the block-matching and 3-D filtering methods are developed for an unsharp filter in YCbCr color space for image denoising and...