Image Pixelation by Mean Color-Preserving Contrast Enhancement

We propose a method for enhancing the contrast between two colors while preserving their mean color, and apply it to image pixelation, where the number of pixels in an input image is reduced, and the contrast between adjacent pixels is enhanced by the proposed method. Experimental results show that the proposed method improves the visibility of each pixel in a pixelated image by enhancing the contrast of neighboring pixels, where the effectiveness of the proposed method is quantitatively evaluated by a pixel saliency measure.