Contrast-preserved chroma enhancement technique using YCbCr color space

TLDR

The YCbCr color space is widely used in image processing because its components roughly correspond to visual attributes, but increasing chroma reduces contrast due to nonorthogonality between components. The study aims to develop a contrast‑preserved chroma enhancement algorithm that predicts luma adjustments to compensate for lightness changes caused by chroma enhancement. The algorithm predicts the required luma changes in the YCbCr space to maintain contrast while enhancing chroma. Experiments show the algorithm effectively enhances perceived chroma and image details.

Abstract

The YCbCr color space is widely used in image processing techniques. The preference for YCbCr is due to the rough correspondence between the YCbCr components and visual attributes. However, image contrast decreases as the chroma value increases owing to the nonorthogonality between YCbCr components. In this study, a contrast-preserved chroma enhancement algorithm using YCbCr signals is proposed by predicting the amounts of luma change needed to compensate for the lightness change induced by chroma enhancement. Numerical and psychophysical experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively enhance the perceived image chroma and details.