Image enhancement and improvement of both color and brightness contrast based on lateral inhibition method

摘要

We propose a new lateral inhibition method for image enhancement which improves both color and brightness contrast. Our method deserves attention for the following reasons: (1) it can adapt itself to the objective image automatically. (2) physiological and psychological behavior of early visual system has been considered and (3) it can affect locally and parallelly both the light region and dark region of the objective image. This method has been derived on the basis of our early vision system and modelized by a simple mathematical function which forms reverse-S shaped stimulus-response curve, and additionally, it can simulate lateral inhibition effects. Our model explains how the lateral inhibition mechanism with local and adaptive processing system realizes the robustness for various input images and detects objects from wide varieties of visual stimuli. The proposed method can make the maximum use of the lateral inhibition effects, perform mild and powerful image enhancement and improve image quality very naturally both at the light and dark regions.