Image enhancement using Retinex and image fusion techniques

The image quality improvement techniques based on Retinex theorem are effective for enhancement of visibility in dark area, while visibility in bright area is degraded. This paper presents an image fusion technique using source image and Retinex-processed image in order to implement high visibility in both bright and dark areas. In the proposed method, the statistic that corresponds to the subject's evaluation is used for image fusion. It is shown through some experiments that the proposed method can generate the image with high visibility in both bright and dark areas, with less computational cost compared with a conventional image fusion method.