Exploiting Perceptual Anchoring for Color Image Enhancement

The preservation of image quality under various display conditions becomes more and more important in the multimedia era. A considerable amount of effort has been devoted to compensating the quality degradation caused by dim LCD backlight for mobile devices and desktop monitors. However, most previous enhancement methods for backlight-scaled images only consider the luminance component and overlook the impact of color appearance on image quality. In this paper, we propose a fast and elegant method that exploits the anchoring property of human visual system to preserve the color appearance of backlight-scaled images as much as possible. Our approach is distinguished from previous ones in many aspects. First, it has a sound theoretical basis. Second, it takes the luminance and chrominance components into account in an integral manner. Third, it has low complexity and can process 720p high-definition videos at 35 frames per second without flicker. The superior performance of the proposed method is verified through psychophysical tests.