Integrated image enhancement method for biometric security

Security methods based on biometrics are gaining importance increasingly for the past few years due to several major security disasters that occurred in the last decade. The successful development of biometric security systems cannot only minimise such threats but may also help in preventing them from happening on a global scale. Biometric security methods take into account humans' unique physical or behavioural traits that help to identify them based on their intrinsic characteristics. Such characteristics are usually obscure due to low quality images produced by Surveillance camera. In this paper, we propose an image enhancement method based on contrast enhancement and colour balancing methods in order to improve the quality of the images. We have improved the colour balancing method significantly in order to get better performance. The proposed method has been applied to the enhancement of low quality images produced by surveillance cameras. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated by applying three face detection methods to surveillance images before and after enhancement using the proposed method. The results show a significant improvement in face detection when the proposed method was applied.