Gray world based color correction and intensity preservation for image enhancement

Images captured by digital cameras are vulnerable to quality degradations due to non-ideal illumination conditions such as dominated lighting source colors, where images so obtained may not faithfully reproduce the scene chromatics accurately. While it is a complicated process to control the scene illumination, color correction used as a post-processing procedure, is becoming an attractive solution. This research has developed an approach for color correction based on a modified implementation of the gray world assumption. The image color is adjusted by employing a gamma correction to satisfy the gray world assumption and avoid color saturation as encountered in the conventional approach. In order to further improve the image visual quality, an intensity preservation criterion is adopted as an additional means to produce the resultant image. With the normalization of intensity in accordance with the original image, an enhanced image both in color and intensity, is finally obtained. A collection of color images are used in an experiment to verify the proposed algorithm. Results have indicated that the proposed method is effective in producing enhanced images in the context of color enhancements.