| Abstract |
Image and video enhancement aims at improving the signal quality relative to imaging artifacts such as noise and blur or atmospheric perturbations such as turbulence and haze. It is usually performed in order to assist humans in analyzing image and video content or simply to present humans visually appealing images and videos. However, image and video enhancement can also be used as a preprocessing technique to ease the task and thus improve the performance of subsequent automatic image content analysis algorithms: preceding dehazing can improve object detection as shown by [23] or explicit turbulence modeling can improve moving object detection as discussed by [24]. But it remains an open question whether image and video enhancement should rather be performed explicitly as a preprocessing step or implicitly for example by feeding affected images directly to a neural network for image content analysis like object detection [25]. Especially for real-time video processing at low latency it can be better to handle image perturbation implicitly in order to minimize the processing time of an algorithm. This can be achieved by making algorithms for image content analysis robust or even invariant to perturbations such as noise or blur. Additionally, mistakes of an individual preprocessing module can obviously affect the quality of the entire processing pipeline. |
