Joint visual sharpness-contrast-tone mapping model

Abstract

Center/Surround (C/S) model of human vision has hinted to improve the sharpness, contrast, and color-tones. To recreate a viewer's sensation in realistic scenes, visual Tone Mapping Operators (TMOs) have been actively developed during past decade and now the spatially-variant TMO is the major stream. Retinex is a root of C/S based vision model which restores the reflectance image by removing the spatial non-uniformities of illumination. This paper proposes a joint sharpness-contrast mapping model cooperating with our adaptive scale-gain MSR (Multi-Scale Retinex). The model is based on the common C/S process with small, medium, and large surrounds. "Sharpness" and "contrast" mappings are unified to a single process choosing a small and medium surrounds, and collaborate with "tone mapping" by MSR using all three surrounds. The new model enhances the visual contrast and sharpness as well as tonal color reproduction under the ill-suited illumination. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.