Revertible Guidance Image Based Image Detail Enhancement

Image detail enhancement is widely used in image processing tasks to give better look and higher contrast to images and photos. However, the reverse process that converts an enhanced image back to its original image usually does not have an explicit representation given only the enhanced image is available. In this work, we propose a generic framework of revertible image detail enhancement so that we can estimate the original image without extra information. We define a family of revertible detail enhancement operators that convert each pixel from original image to enhanced image and vice versa. A guidance image is used to decide which operator to use for each pixel. In the enhancement process, the guidance image is generated from the original image. In the reverse process, the guidance image is estimated from iterative optimization, making the process revertible. Experimental results show that the proposed enhancement framework can convert the enhanced image back to its original image without noticeable difference.