Natural Color Image Enhancement based on Modified Multiscale Retinex Algorithm and Performance Evaluation usingWavelet Energy

This paper presents a new color image enhancement technique based on modified MultiScale Retinex(MSR) algorithm and visual quality of the enhanced images are evaluated using a new metric, namely, wavelet energy. The color image enhancement is achieved by down sampling the value component of HSV color space converted image into three scales (normal, medium and fine) following the contrast stretching operation. These down sampled value components are enhanced using the MSR algorithm. The value component is reconstructed by averaging each pixels of the lower scale image with that of the upper scale image subsequent to up sampling the lower scale image. This process replaces dark pixel by the average pixels of both the lower scale and upper scale, while retaining the bright pixels. The quality of the reconstructed images in the proposed method is found to be good and far better then the other researchers method. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated using new wavelet domain based assessment criterion, referred as wavelet energy. This scheme computes the energy of both original and enhanced image in wavelet domain. The number of edge details as well as wavelet energy is less in a poor quality image compared with naturally enhanced image. Experimental results presented confirms that the proposed wavelet energy based color image quality assessment technique efficiently characterizes both the local and global details of enhanced image.