Adaptive, selective, automatic tonal enhancement of faces

This paper presents an efficient, personalizable and yet completely automatic algorithm for enhancing the brightness, tonal balance, and contrast of faces in thumbnails of online videos where multiple colored illumination sources are the norm and artifacts such as poor illumination and backlight are common. These artifacts significantly lower the perceptual quality of faces and skin, and cannot be easily corrected by common global image transforms. The same identifiable user, however, often uploads or participates in multiple photos, videos, or video chat sessions with varying illumination conditions. The proposed algorithm adaptively transforms the skin pixels in a poor illumination environment to match the skin color model of a prototypical face of the same user in a better illumination environment. It leaves the remaining non-skin portions of the image virtually unchanged while ascertaining a smooth, natural appearance. A component of our system automatically selects such a prot...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: MM
• Authors: Hrishikesh Aradhye, George Toderici, Jay Yagnik
• Keywords: Illumination Environment, MM 2009, Multiple Colored Illumination, Video Chat Sessions