A nighttime image enhancement method based on Retinex and guided filter for object recognition of apple harvesting robot

In order to improve the working efficiency of robot promptly picking ripe apples, the harvesting robot must have the ability of continuous recognition and operation at night. Nighttime apple image has many dark spaces and shadows with low resolution, and therefore, a Retinex algorithm based on guided filter is presented to enhance nighttime image in this article. According to color feature of image, the illumination component is estimated by using guided filter which can be applied as an edge-preserving smoothing operator. And the reflection component with image itself characteristics is obtained by employing single-scale Retinex algorithm. After gamma correction, these two components of image are synthesized into a new enhanced nighttime apple image. Fifty nighttime images acquired under fluorescent lighting are selected to make experiment. Experimental results show that the image enhancement performance indexes processed by the proposed algorithm, such as average gray value, standard deviation, information entropy, average gradient, and segmentation error are superior to those of histogram equalization algorithms and Retinex algorithm based on bilateral filter. In addition, compared with the Retinex algorithm based on bilateral filter, the proposed algorithm has an average reduction of 74.56% in running time with better real-time and higher efficiency. So it can realize the continuous operation of apple harvesting robot at night.