Content awareness-based color image enhancement

This paper presents a novel color image enhancement method to improve the image brightness based on retinex theory. Specifically, the proposed method employs an adaptive gamma correction on the illumination components based on pixels. We appropriately perform the brightness enhancement. Additionally, we restore the detail and color using reflectance components. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing algorithm in terms of subjective assessment and processing speed. Therefore, it can be applied effectively to outdoor vision applications or digital devices including mobile cameras and camcorders with low complexity.