Skin-Aware Local Contrast Enhancement

Local contrast enhancement (LCE) gives a more lively look to an image or video. With a larger difference of a pixel´s luma value from its local mean, the eye needs less time to adjust to that local region for a better contrast sensitivity. Since the human eye is trained and conditioned to recognize a natural looking face, the faces in a locally enhanced image may look unnatural even though other parts of the enhanced image is visually more attractive than the original image. To solve this problem, a low-complexity skin-aware local contrast enhancement algorithm is proposed. The proposed skin-aware local contrast enhancement (SALSA) algorithm avoids creating false edges. Experiment results show that SALSA produces natural looking face and non-facial skin regions in the locally enhanced image.