An environment characterised by darkness, pervasive dust, and uneven light distribution is presented in underground coal mining excavation workfaces. Captured images are frequently suffered from low clarity, poor contrast, and detail loss. Traditional image enhancement techniques fail to address uneven brightness conditions encountered in this specific scenario’s imagery. Existing deep learning-based image processing methods, when applied in this scenario, face the challenge of scarce high-quality image data. Meanwhile, existing deep learning-based methods face the challenge of scarce high-quality image data when applied to underground coal mine excavation workfaces. Therefore, an image enhancement approach for excavation workfaces that integrated an improved self-calibrated illumination (SCI) technique was proposed. Dynamic adjustment was applied to dark areas of the collected excavation face images. Issues such as overexposure, noise amplification, and detail loss were mitigated. Moreover, the captured images were input into the SCI module. A self-calibration module was employed at its core to estimate image illuminance. Furthermore, self-calibrating illumination learning was adopted. Then, the LAB colour space was used to correct colour casts induced by ambient light during white balance adjustment. Local brightness imbalances and insufficient contrast were improved through brightness gain adjustments and adaptive contrast enhancement, whilst highlight and shadow details were preserved. An adaptive gamma correction function was constructed to balance illumination components. Meanwhile, an adaptive saturation nonlinear correction function was designed to optimise colour, rendering images more aligned with human visual perception. Research results demonstrate that, when compared to five commonly used image enhancement algorithms, the underground coal mining excavation workface images processed using the proposed method exhibit favourable performance across evaluation metrics, including mean value, mean gradient, standard deviation, information entropy, and spatial frequency. These metrics show average improvements of 21.41%、50.50%、56.96%、6.60% and 44.05%, respectively. It is confirmed that the problems of low clarity, low visibility, poor contrast, and detail loss are effectively solved in such images.
LI Chang-peng, DAI Zhen-yu, MA Tian-bing, SHI Rui, SU Guo-yong, YU Yan-qing, SHI Qing-hui, TIAN Cui-wei.
Image Enhancement Method for Excavation Face by Integrating Improved Self-calibration Illumination[J].
Science Technology and Engineering, 2026, 26(16): 6966-6977 DOI:10.12404/j.issn.1671-1815.2506964
现阶段,煤矿井下图像增强技术主要分为两种:传统方法增强和深度学习方法增强。传统方法图像增强以空域和频域两类方法为主[3]。其中基于空域图像增强的方法包括Retinex方法[4-5]和直方图均衡化方法[6-7]等。基于频率域的方法包括同态滤波法[8]。其中Retinex方法应用最为广泛,学者们在此基础上提出了很多改进方法。户子睿等[9]提出了基于残差和多尺度注意力机制的Retinex低光图像增强算法,解决了传统Retinex算法纹理不清晰、适用光线单一、噪声放大及颜色失真问题。李正龙等[10]提出了基于含噪Retinex模型的方法,解决低光照图像因噪声影响导致的对比度低、细节模糊等问题。顾文娟等[11]提出了基于双边滤波MSR(multi-scale Retinex)与AutoMSRCR(automated multi-scale retinex with color restoration)融合的算法,解决低光照图像质量差的问题。这些算法对图像增强都有显著的效果。直方图均衡化方法在煤矿井下图像增强方面也得到了广泛的运用。但直方图均衡化算法在对图像进行增强处理后,灰度级会因合并而减少,导致细节丢失[12]。同态滤波存在参数调节复杂、依赖经验、通用性差等问题,可能丢失低频信息,高频细节增强能力有限,分量融合易导致色彩失真[13]。
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