IMAGE ENHANCEMENT BY SEAM CARVING / MSR ALGORITHM

Conventional methods such as cropping or resampling can introduce more losses in information or distortion in resolution. In this paper we propose an improved seam carving algorithm which incorporates multi scale retinex techniques. We propose a MSR improvement for image enhancement. MSR is used on images under non uniform illumination in terms of either color or lightness and has satisfactory results to achieve color constancy and dynamic range compression. MSR is extremely sensitive to noise speckles that cameras produce in low light areas, and it has unsatisfactory effect on areas with normal or intensive illumination. Moreover, MSR uses a gain-offset method for prior-to-display treatment and can lead to apparent data loss on images. This study replaces the logarithm function in MSR with a customized sigmoid function to minimize data loss, and adapts MSR to images by merging results from sigmoid-MSR with seam carving on original images. Experiments show our framework, when applied to images, can preserve areas with normal or intensive lighting and suppress noise speckles in extreme low light areas, we have demonstrated superior performance upon the current seam carving –multi scale retinex methods