Color Image Enhancement Based on Adaptive Nonlinear Curves of Luminance Features

This paper proposes an image-dependent color image enhancement method that uses adaptive luminance enhancement and color emphasis. It effectively enhances details of low-light regions while maintaining well-balanced luminance and color information. To compare the structure similarity and naturalness, we used the tone mapped image quality index (TMQI). The proposed method maintained better structure similarity in the enhanced image than did the space-variant luminance map (SVLM) method or the adaptive and integrated neighborhood dependent approach for nonlinear enhancement (AINDANE). The proposed method required the smallest computation time among the three algorithms. The proposed method can be easily implemented using the field-programmable gate array (FPGA), with low hardware resources and with better performance in terms of similarity.