Image Contrast Enhancement with High Dynamic Range using Singlescale Retinex

Abstract

This paper presents a contrast enhancement method for images with low contrast areas due to uneven illumination. The multi-scale retinex (MSR) is an excellent contrast enhancement method for such images. However, MSR contains many parameters to be determined and it is not easy to determine those parameters properly. In the proposed method, the dynamic range of the entire image is maintained by adding the single scale retinex (SSR) result to the scaled original image, and the contrast is effectively improved. The proposed method has few parameters to be determined. Therefore, it is clarified that the parameters can be determined by specifying the difference between the average values of the whole image before and after enhancement.