Video image enhancement scheme for high resolution consumer devices

Image enhancement scheme for 1080i high resolution video devices is proposed, which is based on variational approach of the Retinex theory. In order to efficiently reduce the enormous computational cost required for image enhancement, processing layers and repeat counts of iterations are determined in accordance with software evaluation result. As for processing architecture, pipeline and parallel pixel processing is introduced so as to handle high resolution pictures in real-time. Besides, the use of illumination image calculated for the previous frame instead of that for the current frame cuts down the required frame memory size. In addition, an application to flicker reduction by the proposed scheme is introduced.