Termite Retinex: A Novel Implementation based on a Colony of Agents

The Retinex algorithm originally presented by Land and McCann uses random paths to explore the image. Throughout the decades, many versions of the Retinex algorithm have been proposed, mainly differing in the way they explore the image, with e.g. random paths, random samples, convolution masks, and variational formulations. In this paper, we propose a step back towards the origin, replacing random paths by traces of specialized ants swarm, here called termites. In presenting the spatial characteristics of the proposed method we discuss differences in path exploration with other Retinex implementations. Two experiments on nine images with 20 observers have been carried out and the results indicate an higher preference of our proposal with respect to the original ones and a previous implementation of Retinex.