Content-based image enhancement in the compressed domain based on multi-scale α-rooting algorithm

A simple multi-scale image enhancement algorithm for compressing image dynamics and enhancing image details in the discrete cosine transform (DCT) domain is presented. First, an image is separated into illumination and reflectance components. Next, the illumination component is manipulated adaptively for image dynamics by using a content measure. The content measure using the energy distribution of the DCT coefficients is defined directly in each DCT block of an image. Then, the reflectance component is altered by a multi-scale alpha-rooting method for enhancing image details based on human visual perception. The main advantage of the proposed algorithm enhances the details in the dark and the bright areas with low computations without boosting noise information and 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 using enhancement quality measures. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.