Near Hue-Preserving Reversible Contrast and Saturation Enhancement Using Histogram Shifting

Abstract

In recent years, several reversible contrast-enhancement methods for color images using digital watermarking have been proposed. These methods can restore an original image from a contrast-enhanced image, in which the information required to recover the original image is embedded with other payloads. In these methods, the hue component after enhancement is similar to that of the original image. However, the saturation of the image after enhancement is significantly lower than that of the original image, and the obtained image exhibits a pale color tone. Herein, we propose a method for enhancing the contrast and saturation of color images and nearly preserving the hue component in a reversible manner. Our method integrates red, green, and blue histograms and preserves the median value of the integrated components. Consequently, the contrast and saturation improved, whereas the subjective image quality improved. In addition, we confirmed that the hue component of the enhanced image is similar to that of the original image. We also confirmed that the original image was perfectly restored from the enhanced image. Our method can contribute to the field of digital photography as a legal evidence. The required storage space for color images and issues pertaining to evidence management can be reduced considering our method enables the creation of color images before and after the enhancement of one image.