Hue-preserving image enhancement in CIELAB color space considering color gamut

Optical Review - In this paper, we propose a color image enhancement method that uses the CIELAB color space to improve the quality of degraded images for human visual perception. In our method,...     

Image enhancement with lightness correction and image sharpening based on characteristics of vision for elderly persons

Optical Review - In general, as people age the functions of their sensory organs deteriorate. For example, in the eye of an elderly person, the visual field becomes dark owing to a decrease in the...     

Improvement in appearance of colors for elderly persons using lightness transform

The color of an object appears to be different for elderly and young persons. This is because human visual features vary with on age. In general, the spectral transmittance of the crystalline lens of an elderly person is lower than that of a young person. The low spectral transmittance decreases the brightness of the visual field. This phenomenon affects the color appearance of an image in human visual perception. In this paper, a lightness transform method is proposed to improve the color appearance of images for elderly persons. In the proposed method, colors that are difficult for an elderly person to see are transformed into colors that are easy to see by adding lightness contrast. The performance of the proposed method is confirmed in experiments using digital images.     

Lightness and chroma enhancement for food images considering Helmholtz–Kohlrausch effect

The color appearance of a food image is very important for making it look delicious. Many food images acquired in low illumination environments do not give delicious impressions because of the deterioration of their color appearance. We propose an image enhancement method to improve the color appearance of a food image acquired in a low illumination environment. In the proposed method, the lightness of each pixel is first enhanced within a color gamut on an equal hue plane in the CIELAB color space. The boundary of the color gamut is given by a lookup table calculated in advance. Then, when the hue of the pixel is attributed to foods, the chroma is enhanced within the color gamut. In this case, we consider Helmholtz–Kohlrausch (H-K) effect, which indicates the relation of the hue, chroma, and lightness in human visual perception. According to H-K effect, the perceived lightness increases as the chroma is enhanced. Therefore, the perceived lightness is preserved after the chroma enhancement, so that the food image is not too enhanced. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, experiments are conducted using several food images.     

Color transfer method preserving perceived lightness

Color transfer originally proposed by Reinhard et al. is a method to change the color appearance of an input image by using the color information of a reference image. The purpose of this study is to modify color transfer so that it works well even when the scenes of the input and reference images are not similar. Concretely, a color transfer method with lightness correction and color gamut adjustment is proposed. The lightness correction is applied to preserve the perceived lightness which is explained by the Helmholtz–Kohlrausch (H–K) effect. This effect is the phenomenon that vivid colors are perceived as brighter than dull colors with the same lightness. Hence, when the chroma is changed by image processing, the perceived lightness is also changed even if the physical lightness is preserved after the image processing. In the proposed method, by considering the H–K effect, color transfer that preserves the perceived lightness after processing is realized. Furthermore, color gamut adjustment is introduced to address the color gamut problem, which is caused by color space conversion. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by performing some experiments.