Color Correction Using Chromaticity of Highlight Region in Multi-Scaled Retinex

In general, as a dynamic range of digital still camera is narrower than a real scene‘s, it is hard to represent the shadow region of scene. Thus, multi-scaled retinex algorithm is used to improve detail and local contrast of the shadow region in an image by dividing the image by its local average images through Gaussian filtering. However, if the chromatic distribution of the original image is not uniform and dominated by a certain chromaticity, the chromaticity of the local average image depends on the dominant chromaticity of original image, thereby the colors of the resulting image are shifted to a complement color to the dominant chromaticity. In this paper, a modified multi-scaled retinex method to reduce the influence of the dominant chromaticity is proposed. In multi-scaled retinex process, the local average images obtained by Gaussian filtering are divided by the average chromaticity values of the original image in order to reduce the influence of dominant chromaticity. Next, the chromaticity of illuminant is estimated in highlight region and the local average images are corrected by the estimated chromaticity of illuminant. In experiment, results show that the proposed method improved the local contrast and detail without color distortion.