A distortion-free contrast enhancement technique based on a perceptual fusion scheme

Contrast enhancement, in a broad sense, is a process whereby some characteristics of an image signal are highlighted. Techniques for image contrast enhancement improve the visibility of image details but may generate some undesirable artifacts such as noise amplification, ringing and overshooting. As a consequence, developing distortion-free methods for image enhancement is of great interest. In this paper, we propose a perceptual fusion technique to improve the performance of some existing contrast enhancement methods in terms of noise amplification. Multi-resolution fusion using the Laplacian pyramid decomposition is performed to account for the multi-channel characteristics of the human visual system (HVS). The results show the efficiency of the proposed method in enhancing details while preventing noise amplification.