Image processing has become under the spotlight recently and leads to a significant shift in various fields such as biomedical, satellite images, and graphical applications. Nevertheless, the poor quality of an image is one of the noticeable limitations of image processing as it restricts efficient data extraction to be conducted. Conventionally, the image was processed via software applications such as MATLAB. In spite of the software's ability to cater to the data extraction of low-quality image issues, it still suffers from the time-consuming issue. As the ability to obtain a rapid outcome is a favorable feature of efficient image processing, the use of hardware in image processing is deemed to keep the addressed issue at bay. Thus, the image enhancement techniques using hardware have gradually rising interest among researchers with numerous approaches such as field programmable gate array (FPGA). In this study, 25 different research papers published from 2016 to 2021 are studied and analyzed to focus on the performance of FPGA as hardware implementation in image processing techniques.

A foggy environment may cause digitally captured images to appear blurry, dim, or low in contrast. This will impact computer vision systems that rely on image information. With the need for real-time image information, such as a plate number recognition system, a simple yet effective image enhancement algorithm using a hardware implementation is very much needed to fulfil the need. To improve images that suffer from low exposure and hazy, the hardware implementations are usually based on complex algorithms. Hence, the aim of this paper is to propose a less complex enhancement algorithm for hardware implementation that is able to improve the quality of such images. The proposed method simply combines brightness and contrast manipulation to enhance the image. In order to see the performance of the proposed method, a total of 100 vehicle registration number images were collected, enhanced, and evaluated. The evaluation results were compared to two other enhancement methods quantitatively and qualitatively. Quantitative evaluation is done by evaluating the output image using peak signal-to-noise ratio and mean-square error evaluation metrics, while a survey is done to evaluate the output image qualitatively. Based on the quantitative evaluation results, our proposed method outperforms the other two enhancement methods.