A Hue Correction Scheme Based on Constant-Hue Plane for Color Image Enhancement

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel hue correction scheme based on constant-hue plane in the RGB color space for color image enhancement. A number of hue-preserving image enhancement methods have already been proposed. Although these methods can preserve hue, these methods cannot be applied to the state-of-the-art enhancement methods such as deep-learning based ones. We therefore generalize a hue-preserving method based on the constant-hue plane in this paper. This generalization derives our novel hue correction scheme. In the proposed scheme, any existing image enhancement method including deep-learning based ones can be used to enhance images. The hue distortion due to the enhancement is then removed by replacing the maximally saturated colors of an enhanced image with those of the corresponding input one. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme is effective to suppress the hue distortion due to two color enhancement methods including a deep-learning based one. Furthermore, objective quality evaluations demonstrate that the proposed scheme can maintain the performance of image enhancement methods.