Resiliency of the Multiscale Retinex Image Enhancement Algorithm

Abstract

The multiscale retinex with color restoration (MSRCR) continues to prove itself in extensive testing to be a very versatile automatic image enhancement algorithm that simultaneously provides dynamic range compression, color constancy, and color rendition. However, issues remain with regard to the resiliency of the MSRCR to different image sources and arbitrary image manipulations which may have been applied prior to retinex processing. In this paper we define these areas of concern, provide experimental results, and, examine the effects of commonly occurring image manipulations on retinex performance. In virtually all cases the MSRCR is highly resilient to the effects of both the image-source variations and commonly encountered prior image-processing. Significant artifacts are primarily observed for the case of selective color channel clipping in large dark zones in an image. These issues are of concern in the processing of digital image archives and other applications where there is neither control over the image acquisition process, nor knowledge about any processing done on the data beforehand.