An adaptive dynamic range compression with local contrast enhancement algorithm for real-time color image enhancement

Dynamic range compression has become an important function used in modern digital video cameras to improve visual quality of color images suffered from low dynamic range and poor contrast defects. This study addresses real-time implementation of an adaptive dynamic range compression algorithm for color image/video enhancement. To achieve this purpose, we first propose a new image-dependent nonlinear intensity-transfer function to produce a satisfactory dynamic range compression result with less color artifacts. The proposed algorithm is then derived by combining the new adaptive nonlinear intensity-transfer function with an efficient local contrast enhancement algorithm. Moreover, an algorithmic acceleration method is also presented to accelerate the processing speed of the proposed color image enhancement method, achieving real-time performance in processing high-definition video signals. Experimental results validate the performance of the developed method in terms of quantitative evaluation, visual quality, computational efficiency, and power consumption.