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1. The document examines the Multiscale Retinex with Color Restoration (MSRCR) algorithm, which aims to imitate human vision by compressing dynamic range and achieving color consistency and lightness rendition across illuminant shifts. 2. It analyzes the performance of MSRCR parameters like surround function form, scale constants, and color restoration constant. 3. Testing found MSRCR consistently outperformed gamma correction and histogram equalization on most images, compressing dynamic range while maintaining color and detail.

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96 views

4 Pages

1. The document examines the Multiscale Retinex with Color Restoration (MSRCR) algorithm, which aims to imitate human vision by compressing dynamic range and achieving color consistency and lightness rendition across illuminant shifts. 2. It analyzes the performance of MSRCR parameters like surround function form, scale constants, and color restoration constant. 3. Testing found MSRCR consistently outperformed gamma correction and histogram equalization on most images, compressing dynamic range while maintaining color and detail.

Uploaded by

ugmadhu
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Abstract

Usually there are differences between a recorded color image and the direct
observation of the same scene. One of the big differences is the fact that the human
visual system is able to distinguish details and vivid colors in shadows and in scenes
that contain illuminant shifts.
In this project we examine the performance of an algorithm called A Multiscale
Retinex with Color Restoration (MSRCR), presented in [1]. This algorithm tries to
imitate human visual “computation” while observing scenes that contains lighting
variations. MSRCR is an extension of a former algorithm called Single Scale
center/surround Retinex (SSR) [2]. MSRCR achieves simultaneous dynamic range
compression, color consistency and lightness rendition. In this project we look for the
optimal value of each parameter of the SSR and the MSRCR. The MSRCR algorithm
was compared to other two, well known, image enhancement methods – gamma
correction and histogram equalization. Results indicated that the performance of the
Multiscale Retinex is consistently good, while the performance of the others is quite
variable.

Basic Approach
The general mathematical formulation of the center/surround Retinex is
R̂ i ( x , y) = log I i ( x , y) − log[ F( x , y) ∗ I i ( x , y)]
where R̂ i (x, y) denotes the Retinex output, Ii(x,y) the image distribution in the i'th
color spectral band, “*” the convolution operation, and F(x,y) the surround function
−r 2 / c 2
F( x , y) = Ke
where c is the Gaussian surround space constant and K is selected such that
∫∫F( x, y)dxdy =1
The MSR output is then simply a weighted sum of the outputs of several different
SSR output.
N
R̂ MSR i = ∑ w n R̂ n ,i
n =1

where N is the number of scales, R̂ n ,i the i'th component of the n’th scale, R̂ MSR the i

i'th spectral component of the MSR output, and wn the weight associated with the
n’th scale. The only difference between R̂(x, y) and R̂ n (x, y) is that the surround
function is now given by
2
/ c 2n
Fn ( x , y) = K n e − r
The color restoration method for the MSR is given by
S 
C i ( x , y) = log[ αI i ( x , y)] − log ∑ I i ( x , y)
 i =1 
where α is a constant parameter of the color restoration function. The MSRCR is
given by
R̂ MSRCRi ( x , y) = C i ( x , y) R̂ MSRi ( x , y)

The final version of MSRCR can be written as


N
R̂ MSRCRi ( x , y) = G[C i ( x , y)∑{log I i ( x , y) − log[ I i ( x , y) ∗ Fn ( x , y)]} + b]
n =1
where G and b are the final gain and offset values respectively.
1. Daniel J. Jobson, Zia-ur Rahman, Glenn A. Woodell; “A Multiscale Retinex for Bridging the Gap Between Color
Images and the Human Observation of Scenes”, IEEE Transaction on Image Processing, vol. 6, no. 7, July 1997.

2. Daniel J. Jobson, Zia-ur Rahman, Glenn A. Woodell; “Properties and Performance of a Center/ Surround Retinex”, IEEE
Transaction on Image Processing, vol. 6, no. 3, March 1997.
Project Goal
In this project we examine several aspects concerning the SSR:
• the form of the surround function
• the placement of the log function
• the scale constant for the surround function
• the treatment of the Retinex result before display

In addition, we also examine the following parameters of the MSRCR algorithm:


• the combination three scales (small, intermediate and large) of the SSR functions
• the weights associated with the scales
• the color restoration constant.

Tools
The algorithm was realized as a MATLAB program. In order to ease the research
and to make it more convenient to get the visual results, we developed a graphic user
interface (GUI), see Figure 1. The GUI allows the user to change the MSRCR
constants before running the algorithm and to compare the resulting performance to
the performance of a standard brightness correction (gamma correction).

Figure 1: Graphic User Interface for the MSRCR algorithm.

Results

Figure 2 illustrates the MSRCR performance. As seen the MSRCR algorithm


achieves graceful dynamic range compression together with tonal and color rendition.
The MSRCR algorithm was also tested on some images with familiar colors and no
strong lighting defects and the results showed that the MSRCR does not introduce
significant distortions into images without lighting variations.
Figure 2: The performance of the MSRCR: top row - original images, bottom raw – MSRCR
Conclusions
• The performance of the three surround functions: inverse square, exponential and
Gaussian are quite similar. This result stands in contrast to the results presented in
[2], in which the Gaussian’s performance was significantly better. The Gaussian
function was chosen as the form of the surround function because of compliance
considerations and due to its small width in comparison to the other two.
• The placement of the log function should be after surround formation.
• The scale constant of the Gaussian function should be 80 ≤ C 3 ≤ 120 in order to
get a satisfying image quality. This range of C3 is quite close to the range presented
in [2] ( 50 ≤ C 3 ≤ 100 ).
• The MSR is composed of three SSR functions with small(c=80), intermediate
(c=120) and large (c=250) scale-constants. This combination allows the MSR to
synthesize dynamic range compression, color consistency and tonal rendition,
except for scenes that contain violation of the gray-world assumption. The color
restoration function produces good color rendition even when a gray-world
violation occurs. The scale constants that were chosen in [1] are: c=15, c=80,
c=250. We chose larger constant values because small values produce desaturation
of colors in the final image.
• The Retinex output has to be processed before displaying. This includes clipping
some of the lowest values in order to get better color rendition. The gain and offset
constants do not vary either from image to image or between color bands.
Tests comparing MSRCR to other image enhancement methods: gamma
correction and histogram equalization indicate that the performance of the Multiscale
Retinex is consistently good, while the performance of the others is quite variable.
Gamma correction produces unsharp masking that damages the color rendition and
blurs the details, though sometimes its dynamic range compression is better than the
MSRCR’s. Histogram equalization may produces artifacts, but occasionally it
produces better color rendition than the MSRCR.

Acknowledgments
We would like to thank our supervisor Dr. Doron Shaked for his support and
guidance throughout this project. Also we would like to thank Johanan Erez for his
attention and help during the whole project. This project was supported by the
Ollendorff Research Center Fund.

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