A simple and efficient image enhancement in the compressed domain

The objective of this paper is to develop a simple and efficient image enhancement algorithm for compressing image dynamics and enhancing image contrast in the discrete cosine transform (DCT) domain. The basic idea of this approach is to separate illumination and reflectance components of an image, so that by decreasing the contribution of the illumination the proposed algorithm effectively controls the dynamic range of the image using a contrast measure. The main advantage of the proposed algorithm is to enhance details in the dark and the bright areas with low computations without affecting the compressibility of the original image since it performs on the images in the compressed domain. In order to evaluate the proposed scheme, several base line approaches are described and compared.