Correction of the overexposed region in digital color image

The overexposure usually occurs in the digital image due to the limited dynamic range of the low dynamic range (LDR) displays. In this paper, we propose a novel method to correct the overexposed region in the image, which consists of the lightness recovery and the color correction. In the proposed method, the lightness in the overexposed region is modeled as a two-dimensional Gaussian function, and a new energy functional of both the Gaussian modeled lightness and the gradients of the original image is minimized to recover the lightness. For correcting the color, we apply the bilateral filter with weights obtained using the recovered lightness to the color of the overexposed region. The algorithm's performance is experimentally compared to state-of-the-art algorithm, demonstrating comparable or favorable results.