Fast Correction of Nonuniform Illumination on Bi-level Images using Block Based Intensity Normalization

We investigated a novel fast non-uniform illumination correction method for bi-level images. The proposed method divides a bi-level image into sub-images and roughly estimates block-wise illumination by low pass filtered maximum values of sub-images. After that, we apply bilinear interpolation using the block-wise illumination to estimate non-uniform illumination, and compensate for the effect of non-uniform illumination using the estimated illumination. Since the proposed method is not based on computation intensive iterative optimization, the proposed method can be used effectively for applications that require fast correction of non-uniform illumination. In simulations, the proposed method showed more than 20 times faster speed than existing entropy minimization method. Moreover, in simulations and experiments, the restored images by the proposed method were more close to true images than images restored by conventional method.