Coloring night-vision imagery with statistical properties of natural colors by using image segmentation and histogram matching

A natural color mapping method has been previously proposed that matches the statistical properties (mean and standard deviation) of night-vision (NV) imagery to those of a daylight color image (manually selected as the "target" color distribution). Thus the rendered NV image appears to resemble the target image in terms of colors. However, in this prior method the colored NV image may appear unnatural if the target image ' s "global" color statistics are too different from that of the night vision scene (e.g., it would appear to have too much green if much more foliage was contained in the target image). Consequently, a new "local coloring" method is presented in the current paper, and functions to render the NV image segment-by-segment by using a histogram matching technique. Specifically, a false-color image (source image) is formed by assigning multi-band NV images to three RGB (red, green and blue) channels. A nonlinear diffusion filter is then applied to the false-colored image to reduce the number of colors. The final grayscale image segments are obtained by using clustering and merging techniques. The statistical matching procedure is merged with the histogram matching procedure to assure that the source image more closely resembles the target image with respect to color. Instead of using a single target color image, the mean, standard deviation and histogram distribution of a set of natural scene images are used as the target color properties for each color scheme. Corresponding to the source region segments, the target color schemes are grouped by their scene contents (or colors) such as green plants, roads, ground/earth. In our experiments, five pairs of night-vision images were initially analyzed, and the images that were colored (segment-by-segment) by the proposed "local coloring" method are shown to be much more natural, realistic, and colorful when compared with those produced by the "global-coloring" method.