According to the vision character of cone and rod in human’s retina

a new model called vision adaptability model is proposed in this paper

the model aims at enhancing color image. Based on Retinex and vision adaptability model a new algorithm for image enhancement is proposed

in this algorithm the illumination image’s approximate is simply removed and the reflectance image’s approximate is calculated

then the global contrast and brightness of reflectance image’s approximate are adjusted according to the proposed model

which make the enhanced image agree with human’s vision. The proposed algorithm and some classic Retinex algorithms are applied to the same degraded RGB images in the experiment

then qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis are conducted on the experimental results. It can be concluded from the comparison that the proposed algorithm performs better than preexisted Retinex algorithms on enhancing the image details and upgrading the global contrast.