Bit Planes Histogram Equalization for Tone Mapping of High Contrast Images

The imaging system normally used and the reproduction media has the capability to perceive scenes within a narrow range of contrast whereas the human visual system can perceive very high contrast with ease. We constantly strive to map one such set of colors to another or to address the problem of strong contrast reduction from active values to the displayable range preserving the image details. The goals of the mapping may differ depending on the application and the result we seek. A large number of computationally intensive methods have been developed in the past to address this problem. In this paper we try to develop a simple but extremely effective method to address to the problem of high contrast images so as to be able to reproduce them on media with minimum loss of detail and minimum introduction of "canvas like" effects.