A Total Variation Model for Retinex

Abstract

Human vision has the ability to recognize color under varying illumination conditions. Retinex theory is introduced to explain how the human visual system perceives color. The main aim of this paper is to present a total variation model for Retinex. Different from the existing methods, we consider and study two important elements which include illumination and reflection. We assume spatial smoothness of the illumination and piecewise continuity of the reflection, where the total variation term is employed in the model. The existence of the solution of the model is shown in the paper. We employ a fast computation method to solve the proposed minimization problem. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.