How to enhance the colors and contrast of an image - graphics

Question

I need to process the first "Original" image to get something similar to the second "Enhanced" one. I applied some naif calculation and the new image has more contrast and more strong colors but in the higher color regions a color hole appears. I have no idea about image processing, it would be great if you can suggest me which concepts and/or algorithms I could apply to get the result without this problem.

Answer 1

Convert the image to the HSB (Hue, Saturation, Brightness) color space.
Multiply the saturation by some amount. Use a cutoff value if your platform requires it.
Example in Mathematica:
satMult = 4; (*saturation multiplier *)
imgHSB = ColorConvert[Import["http://i.imgur.com/8XkxR.jpg"], "HSB"];
cs = ColorSeparate[imgHSB]; (* separate in H, S and B*)
newSat = Image[ImageData[cs[[2]]] * satMult]; (* cs[[2]] is the saturation*)
ColorCombine[{cs[[1]], newSat, cs[[3]]}, "HSB"]] (* rebuild the image *)
A table increasing the saturation value:

Answer 2

The "holes" that you see in the processed picture are the darker areas of the original picture, which went to negative values with your darkening algorithm. I suspect these out of range values are then written to the new image as positive numbers, so they end up in the higher part of the brightness scale. For example, let's say a pixel value is 10, and you are substracting 12 from all pixels to darken them a bit. This pixel will underflow and become -2. When you write it back to the file, -2 gets represented as 0xfe in hex, and this is 254 if you take it as an unsigned number.
You should use an algorithm that keeps the pixel values within the valid range, or at least you should "clamp" the values to the valid range. A typical clamp function defined as a C macro would be:
#define clamp(p) (p < 0 ? 0 : (p > 255 ? 255 : p))
If you add the above macro to your processing function it will take care of the "holes", but instead you will now have dark colors in those places.
If you are ready for something a bit more advanced, here on Wikipedia they have the brightness and contrast formulas that are used by The GIMP. These which will do a pretty good job with your image if you choose the proper coefficients.

Answer 3

This wikipedia article does a good job of explaining histogram equalization for contrast enhancement.
Code for grayscale images:
unsigned char* EnhanceContrast(unsigned char* data, int width, int height)
{
int* cdf = (int*) calloc(256, sizeof(int));
for(int y = 0; y < height; y++) {
for(int x = 0; x < width; x++) {
int val = data[width*y + x];
cdf[val]++;
}
}
int cdf_min = cdf[0];
for(int i = 1; i < 256; i++) {
cdf[i] += cdf[i-1];
if(cdf[i] < cdf_min) {
cdf_min = cdf[i];
}
}
unsigned char* enhanced_data = (unsigned char*) malloc(width*height);
for(int y = 0; y < height; y++) {
for(int x = 0; x < width; x++) {
enhanced_data[width*y + x] = (int) round(cdf[data[width*y + x]] - cdf_min)*255.0/(width*height-cdf_min);
}
}
free(cdf);
return enhanced_data;
}