A novel Retinex image enhancement approach via brightness channel prior and change of detail prior

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel Retinex image enhancement approach by adopting two important prior named brightness channel prior (BCP) and change of detail (CoD) prior. We first derive a rough illumination map estimation method via BCP and Retinex model. Then, we present a combination refining method which involves the guided filter and a new total variation (TV) smoothing operator to eliminate the block effect in the rough illumination map while maintain the local smoothness property. In addition, we propose a novel sharping algorithm rely on CoD prior to improve the visual effect of the degraded image. Experimental results verify that our approach outperforms current approaches in terms of effectiveness, efficiency and universality.