New artificial life model for image enhancement

•A new artificial life model for image enhancement is proposed.•The new model is based on the behavior of an intelligent organism.•The model is evaluated using synthetic and real images with different levels of noise.•Different quality metrics are used to assess the model efficiency.

In this work, a method to enhance images based on a new artificial life model is presented. The model is inspired on the behavior of a herbivore organism, when this organism is in a certain environment and selects its food. This organism travels through the image iteratively, selecting the more suitable food and eating parts of it in each iteration. The path that the organism travels through in the image is defined by a priori knowledge about the environment and how it should move in it. Here, we modeled the control and perception centers of the organism, as well as the simulation of its actions and effects on the environment. To demonstrate the efficiency of our method quantitative and qualitative results of the enhancement of synthetic and real images with low contrast and different levels of noise are presented. Obtained results confirm the ability of the new artificial life model for improving the contrast of the objects in the input images.