TECHNIQUE FOR ENHANCING DIGITAL COLOR IMAGES BY CONTRAST STRETCHING IN MUNSELL COLOR SPACE.

The Munsell color system can be used to further enhance the appearance of high-quality digital color-composite images. A color-balanced 'standard' color-composite image is first produced using any desired contrast stretching algorithm. The stretched digital data are then transformed into the cylindrical Munsell color space. An enhanced version of a color-composite image is produced by stretching the saturation parameter over the full digital range and inverting the modified Munsell coordinates to red-blue-green (tristimulus) data space. The resulting image has greater color-saturation contrast than the original image, without hue change. Contrast stretching in Munsell color space reduces the correlation between individual bands or ratios and is similar to decorrelation processing based on principal-components transforms. However, principal components are based on data variance, with less variance being explained by each higher order component.