Abstract—Light has always played a very important role in human economic activities. Nevertheless, there are only a few popular sources of electric light. While incandescent amps have been popular in the past, they are not energy efficient. In recent years, fluorescent lamps are becoming popular as an alternative and this is especially true for schools and businesses. Probably due to these developments, there has been some significant interest in examining the consistency of the light intensity from electric lamps. While some have looked at this as a means to quickly identify the system components of fluorescent lamps, others have analyzed this to help identify the liveness of the scene. High speed video cameras can easily detect variations in the illumination levels from fluorescent lamps, but they can be quite costly to operate. Moreover, most popular security video cameras can only operate up to a maximum speed of 30 frames per second. This paper examines the use of Structural Distortion as an image quality measure to detect flickering on video signals from the video cameras at low frame rates. Future research is outlined at the end of the paper.

Index Terms—lighting systems, image quality metrics, illumination analysis, incandescent lamps, fluorescent lamps

Cite: Weng Kin Lai, Li Li Lim, and Tomas H. Maul, "Illumination Analysis of Inactive Indoor Scenes with the Discrete Fourier Transform of Structural Distortions," International Journal of Signal Processing Systems, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 12-16, June 2014. doi: 10.12720/ijsps.2.1.12-16