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Image enhancement with lightness correction and image sharpening based on characteristics of vision for elderly persons

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Abstract

In general, as people age the functions of their sensory organs deteriorate. For example, in the eye of an elderly person, the visual field becomes dark owing to a decrease in the amount of light reaching the retina. Moreover, objects appear blurred due to a decrease in contrast sensitivity. In particular, the contrast sensitivity decreases remarkably as the spatial frequency increases. In this study, we propose an image enhancement method that considers the visual characteristics of elderly persons. The proposed method combines lightness correction and amplification of high spatial frequency components to obtain images with optimized visibility for elderly persons. In particular, lightness enhancement that guarantees color gamut via tone mapping is conducted. In addition, image sharpening is applied based on the inverse characteristic function of the contrast sensitivity curve. The experiments were performed using several digital color images to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Mr. Koki Fujiwara for his cooperation during the study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Sciences and Technology for Innovation, Yamaguchi University, Yamaguchi, 753-8512, Japan

    Daiki Moriyama, Noriaki Suetake & Eiji Uchino

  2. Department of Culture and Creative Arts, Yamaguchi Prefectural University, Yamaguchi, 753-8502, Japan

    Tadahiro Azetsu

  3. Department of Information and Computer Engineering, Okayama University of Science, Okayama, 700-0005, Japan

    Chiaki Ueda

  4. Fuzzy Logic Systems Institute, Iizuka, 820-0064, Japan

    Eiji Uchino

Authors
  1. Daiki Moriyama
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  2. Tadahiro Azetsu
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  3. Chiaki Ueda
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  4. Noriaki Suetake
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  5. Eiji Uchino
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Correspondence to Tadahiro Azetsu.

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Moriyama, D., Azetsu, T., Ueda, C. et al. Image enhancement with lightness correction and image sharpening based on characteristics of vision for elderly persons. Opt Rev 27, 352–360 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10043-020-00602-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10043-020-00602-y

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