Contrast enhancement of night time imagery for traffic activity understanding

Traffic activity understanding is a vital research topic, as it not only tries to understand the changes in the traffic pattern during the different time periods in a day but also assist in the security of passengers. In the present times, the traffic condition in most urban settings is plagued by congestion and the problem of traffic management during night time conditions poses even greater challenges due to the various factors such as poor street light illumination, improper urban planning etc. Under these conditions, the visibility of vehicles and other objects on the streets are quite poor. Hence, image contrast enhancement techniques are required to be applied on such night time traffic imaging datasets for extraction and analysis of information. In this study, we compare the different state-of-the-art image contrast enhancement techniques suitable for the images acquired under low light and the results are compared and presented.