Correction of the overexposed region in digital color image

The overexposed region (OR) usually appears in the image due to the limited dynamic range of digital camera and low dynamic range display. In this paper, we present a novel overexposure correction method composed of the lightness correction and the chrominance restoration. In proposed method, the corrected lightness of the OR is obtained by minimizing a proposed energy functional with two terms; one for retaining the lightness modeled by a twodimensional Gaussian function and the other for preserving the gradients of the original lightness. In chrominance restoration, color stretching is first performed to compensate a faded color around the OR. Then, the color of the OR is recovered by propagating the stretched color of the neighboring non-overexposed region (non-OR). Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method more effectively improves the visual quality of the overexposed image compared with the state-of-the-art methods.