Color Image Enhancement Using a Retinex Algorithm with Bilateral Filtering for Images with Poor Illumination
Agustien Mulyantini, Heung‐Kook Choi · Journal of Korea Multimedia Society · 2016
Color enhancement basically deals with color manipulation in digital images. Recently, the technique has become widely used as a result of the increasing use of digital cameras. Retinex-based color-enhancement algorithms are a popular technique. In this paper, retinex with bilateral filtering is proposed to improve the quality of poorly illuminated images. Generally, it consists of three main steps: first, a retinex-based algorithm with color restoration; second, transformation mapping using histogram matching; and finally, smoothing the image using a bilateral filter. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can successfully enhance image contrast while avoiding the halo effect and maintaining the color distribution in the image.