Local contrast enhancement (LCE) gives a more lively look to an image or video. With a larger difference of a pixel's luma value from its local mean, the eye needs less time to adjust to that local region for a better contrast sensitivity. Since the human eye is trained and conditioned to recognize a natural looking face, the faces in a locally enhanced image may look unnatural even though other parts of the enhanced image is visually more attractive than the original image. To solve this

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... m, a lowcomplexity skin-aware local contrast enhancement algorithm is proposed. The proposed Skin-Aware Local contraSt enhAncement (SALSA) algorithm avoids creating false edges. Experiment results show that SALSA produces natural looking face and non-facial skin regions in the locally enhanced image.