RALATIVITY AND CONTRAST ENHANCEMENT Connecting properties of the human visual system with mathematics from the theory of relativity

In this paper we present a novel mathematical model for color image processing. The proposed algebraic structure is based on a special mapping of color vectors into the space of bi-quaternions (quaternions with complex coefficients) inspired by the theory of relativity. By this transformation, the space of color vectors remains close under scalar multiplication and addition and limited by an upper and lower bounds. The proposed approach is therefore terms Cages Image Processing (KIP). We demonstrate the usability of the new model by a color image enhancement algorithm. The proposed enhancement algorithm prevents information loss caused by color saturation which is an artifact of the Logarithmic Image Processing (LIP) approach. Experimental results on synthetic and natural images comparing the proposed algorithm to the LIP based algorithm are provided.