Natural Enhancement of Color Image

Abstract

A new algorithm of Natural Enhancement of Color Image (NECI) is proposed. It is inspired by multiscale Retinex model. There are four steps to realize this enhancement. At first, the image appearance is rendered by content-dependent global mapping for light cast correction, and then a modified Retinex filter is applied to enhance the local contrast. Histogram rescaling is used afterwards for normalization purpose. At last, the texture details of image are enhanced by emphasizing the high-frequency components of image using multichannel decomposition of Cortex Transform. In the contrast enhancement step, luminance channel is firstly enhanced, and then a weighing map is calculated by collecting luminance enhancement information and applied to chrominance channel in color space CIELCh which enables a proportional enhancement of chrominance. It avoids the problem of unbalanced enhancement in classical RGB independent channel operation. In this work, it is believed that image enhancement should avoid dramatic modifications to image such as light condition changes, color temperature alteration, or additional artifacts introduced or amplified. Disregarding light conditions of the scene usually leads to unnaturally sharpened images or dramatic white balance changes. In the proposed method, the ambience of image (warm or cold color impression) is maintained after enhancement, and no additional light sources are added to the scene, and no halo effect and blocking effect are amplified due to overenhancement. It realizes a Natural Enhancement of Color Image. Different types of natural scene images have been tested and an encouraging performance is obtained for the proposed method.