Computer vision-based crowd understanding and analysis technology has been widely used in public safety due to the rapid growth of population and the frequent occurrence of various accidents. Improving imaging quality is the key to improve the performance of crowd analysis, density estimation, target recognition, segmentation, and detection in computer vision tasks. Due to the complex imaging environment such as fog and low illumination, some images taken in outdoor environment often have the problems of colour distortion, lack of details, and the poor imaging quality, which affect the subsequent visual tasks. To improve the imaging quality and visual effect, an adaptive colour restoration and detail retention-based method is proposed for image enhancement. First, to overcome the problem of colour distortion caused by low illumination and fog, a multi-channel fusion based adaptive image colour restoration method is proposed. To make the enhancement result more consistent with human observation, the detail retention-based method is applied to enhance the details. Experimental results demonstrate that the authors' results are effective and outperform the compared methods both in visual and objective evaluations.
INTRODUCTIONPublic safety problems have widely attracted attentions due to the frequent occurrence of various safety accidents in the world. Crowd density analysis, detection and intelligent transportation are popular research topics in the field of public safety. Particularly, with the rapid growth of population, crowd counting and analysis have been widely used in video surveillance, traffic control and sports events. In recent years, the development of artificial intelligence technology enables computer vision-based crowd understanding and analysis to develop rapidly. The performance of computer vision-based technology depends on the imaging quality. Therefore, image enhancement is an important technology in computer vision tasks, such as person counting, crowd analysis, re-identification, target segmentation and recognition [1][2][3][4], which is widely used in public safety, military and other visual applications.With the rapid development of deep learning and computer vision technology, many image vision-based intelligent tasks are realized, such as intelligent security and intelligent transportation. Based on the techniques of pattern recognition and machine learning, the person re-identification, vehicle detectionThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.