A new algorithm based on saturation and desaturation in the xy chromaticity diagram for enhancement and re-rendition of color images

This paper presents a new algorithm for color contrast enhancement which adopts the xy chromaticity diagram and consists of two steps. All the "chromatic" colors are first maximally saturated within a certain gamut; the opportune desaturation operation which follows is based on the center of gravity law for color mixture. This prevents the introduction of unnatural colors and, in combination with a suitable manipulation of the brightness value, turns out to increase the image sharpness and to provide more appealing results Our technique can also be applied to re-rendition a color image since it can easily simulate the change of the illuminant(s) of the scene portrayed in the image, this could find useful applications in image and video editing. Some examples of the performance of the algorithm are reported and discussed