Surrounding adaptive tone mapping in displayed images under ambient light

In this paper, we propose surrounding adaptive tone mapping in displayed images under ambient light. Under strong ambient light, the displayed images on the screen are darkly perceived by human eyes, especially in dark regions. We deal with the ambient light problem in mobile devices by brightness enhancement and adaptive tone mapping. First, we perform brightness compensation in dark regions using Bartleson-Breneman equation which represents lightness effect on the image under different surrounding illuminations. Then, we perform adaptive tone mapping to reproduce the whole image under various ambient light conditions. Adaptive tone mapping combines human visual characteristics with a tone mapping operation considering ambient light influence. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly enhances the readability of displayed images under different surrounding light conditions.