Quality enhancement for feature matching on car black box videos

Abstract

Video has difficulty to maintain consistent intensity and color tone from frame to frame. Particularly, it happens when imaging device such as black box camera has to deal with fast changing illumination environment. However, conventional automatic white balance algorithms cannot handle this good enough to maintain tone consistency, which is observed in most commercial black box products. In this paper, a novel tone stabilization is proposed to enhance the performance of further applied algorithms like detecting and matching visual features across video frames. The proposed technique utilizes multiple anchor frames as references to smooth tone fluctuation between them. Experimental result shows the improvement of tone consistency as well as feature detection and matching accuracy on car black box videos with varying tone over time.