An Effective Contrast Enhancement Approach for Wide Dynamic Range Image

Abstract

Wide dynamic range image enhancement plays an important role in image processing applications. This study presents a low-complexity automatic method for wide range image contrast enhancement. According to a large number of experimental results that a narrow range image enhancement problem can be described easily by Gaussian curve. In this paper, we divide wide dynamic range image into regular cells and then applying an optimized image remapping method based on contrast gain redistribution function groups. By improving the bilinear fusion method between cells and simplifying the mean and variance of the contrast gain redistribution function, the algorithm complexity is reduced significantly and the whole process is fully automatic. Experiments show that the presented method enhances the visual effect of the wide dynamic range image effectively and fast, making it suitable for real-time applications.