A Variational Model for Color Assignment

Abstract

Color image enhancement is a challenging task in digital imaging with many applications. This paper contributes to image enhancement methods. We propose a new variational model for color improvement in the RGB space based on a desired target intensity image. Our model improves the visual quality of the color image while it preserves the range and takes the hue of the original, badly exposed image into account without amplifying its color artifacts. To approximate the hue of the original image we use the fact that affine transforms are hue preserving. To cope with the noise in the color channels we design a particular coupled TV regularization term. Since the target intensity of the image is unaltered our model respects important image structures. Numerical results demonstrate the very good performance of our method.