Intensity surface stretching technique for contrast enhancement of digital photography

In this paper we propose a contrast enhancement technique which stretches the intensity surfaces of an image to improve the quality of a digital photo. The proposed method enhances the contrast of an image by stretching the intensity surface of the original image to the maximum range of the output image. This is done in proportion to the distances between the original intensity surface, and the upper and lower intensity surfaces respectively. The upper and lower intensity surfaces are generated adaptively from the original intensity surface by gaussian smoothing and gamma transform. In our experiments, digital color images in a variety of illumination conditions were used, and the proposed method was compared with other algorithms such as histogram stretching, histogram equalization, gamma correction, and retinex. From the results of the experiments, it was proven that the proposed algorithm further enhanced the contrast more than other methods and resulted in a more natural image without deterioration of gradation.