METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR PERFORMING AN ADAPTIVE EXTENDED DYNAMIC RANGE ALGORITHM

A method and apparatus are provided for performing an extended dynamic range (EDR) algorithm. The apparatus comprises an EDR processing component which performs the EDR algorithm of the invention in order to compress an image input to the EDR processing component down to a desired gray scale range. The EDR processing component automatically adapts to the dynamic range of an input image so that the input image is compressed down to a desired gray scale range while preserving high frequency contrast information contained in the input image. In addition to automatically adjusting to the dynamic range of the image, the EDR processing component compresses the input image in such a manner that the difference between the input image intensity and the local mean intensity value is taken into account, which prevents artifacts associated with enhanced negative contrast from appearing in the compressed image.