Histogram evaluation for image quality concerning illumination I'm currently trying to develop an algorithm to control the camera characteristic of a camera (the camera characteristic can be controlled to adopt it to the different lightning situation which can occur)

In this case I need a good measurement of the exposure/lightning on the current image taken (i.e., if it's under/overexposed, well-exposed, maybe low/high contrast etc). And I'm therefore looking for a measurement on how to decide that. So far I couldn't find much about it. I found only ONE paper:

It's called "An optimal measure for camera focus and exposure" (DOI) from 2004 which describes some measurements like mean-values, entropy, standard deviation etc. based on the histogram to somehow measure the image quality (concerning focus and exposure). I also found many other papers which try to measure the image quality concerning things like blur, distortion etc etc but I don't need that obviously as I only want to control the camera characteristic to get a good contrast and exposure of my image -> thus, a well-balanced histogram.

Do you know any other measures which could help me with that or do you maybe have another idea on how solve that issue and how to build a good controller of my camera characteristic?
I understand that what you are looking for is a contrast measure. Since, I am not sure as to which different research papers you have looked at, I am giving here links to some important and good papers in this area. Refer to them. If you are unable to make sense of them, reply back, and I would try my best to help 

Measuring pereptual contrast in color images

Measuring the perceived contrast of natural images

Hope this helps