Contrast-preserved chroma enhancement technique using YCbCr color space

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.