JND-based enhancedment of perceptibility for dim images

Maintaining image quality under various lighting conditions is critical to portable multimedia devices. In this paper, an image enhancement algorithm is proposed to deal with extremely dim LCD backlight (or strong ambient light) under which the image often becomes imperceptible. The crux of our idea is to keep the detail content of the image in the visible luminance range. To do that, a two-layer image decomposition architecture based on the just noticeable difference (JND) theory is proposed for extracting the details, and a boosting scheme is applied to the details that are in the low intensity regions of the image. Experimental results are provided to show the superiority of the proposed algorithm.