Colour-Science i2e Intelligent Image Enhancement software librarys

 

 

Introduction

 

The i2e image enhancement library is a C/C++ Win32 library that can be used in any 32-bit Windows or Linux environment. It provides all the file and image processing functions which are needed to enhance images coming from digital cameras or scanners. It is available as a DLL that can be used from almost any programming environment (including C/C++, VB, C#, MC++, PowerBasic, Delphi, Access, and many more).

 

The i2e image enhancement library lets the user scale the image enhancement pipeline which is suitable for his application. This way he can configure for example a basic image enhancement pipeline which runs on a MMS cell phone or a more complete enhancement pipeline with all features for a high end film scanner. There are several enhancement stages in the pipeline which can be enabled or disabled.

 

The enhancement stages and technologies can be divided in two classes. The base processing stages act globally on the whole image. In addition to these global enhancement stages there are some specialized stages which act locally on the image.

 

Global image enhancement processing stages

Local image enhancement processing stages

ABE    Adaptive Brightness and Contrast Enhancement

SHE    Shadow and Highlight Enhancement

ACE    Adaptive Color Enhancement       

MCE   Memory Color Enhancement

ICC    input and output profiling

LSE    Local Sharpness Enhancement

 

LNR    Local Noise Jpeg Artefact Reduction

 

RER    Red Eye Removal

 

In addition to these enhancement stages the library allows a statistical analysis of the whole film which is especially appropriate for negative film scanners allowing to scan in a single channel mode.

 

The i2e library is doing an extensive analysis of the images and the data of this analysis is available also for other purposes then image enhancement. The data can for example be used for image classification.

 

The following image info is available:

  • vegetation in % of total image surface

  • sky in % of total image surface

  • skin in % of total image surface

  • number of faces

  • face coordinates of every face rectangle

  • total face surface in % of total image surface

  • exposure level

  • local contrast

  • red eye flag

  • exif tags

  • others ... (we are currently working on this part of the library)

 

Technical description of the library (674kb PDF file) >>>

 

API description (380kb PDF file) >>>

 

Show sample images (120kb PDF file) >>>

 

Show comparison with Photoshop 7 "auto level" image enhancement (820kb PDF file) >>>