Metaheuristics-equipped automated contrast enhancement for images from mast camera onboard curiosity Rover
摘要
The Curiosity rover is a robotic vehicle launched by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for exploring Mars. Often the quality of Martian images (MIs) are impacted by insufficient lighting and adverse environmental conditions. Deteriorated quality hinders the content-based screening, self-diagnostics, and terrain classification. A metaheuristics-equipped automated algorithm for quality compensation of MIs (MAAQCMI) is introduced in this paper. The MAAQCMI is a composite framework comprising a human contrast sensitivity-based sigmoid intensity transformation (HCSIT) and an integrated module of slime mold optimizer (SMO) and natural image quality evaluator (NIQE) fitness meant for incorporating auto-tuning functionality to the MAAQCMI. The MAAQCMI shows a contrast improvement ratio (CIR) (1.21 ± 0.09) higher than one, negligibly low lightness order error (LOE) (2.35 ± 3.86) and sparse feature fidelity (SFF) (0.97 ± 0.01) close to one on a dataset comprising 100 low quality MIs. The MAAQCMI produces quality compensated MIs with improved contrast, without injecting any colour distortions and causing any information loss.