  Research on automated image enhancement has gained momentum in recent years,
partially due to the need for easy-to-use tools for enhancing pictures captured
by ubiquitous cameras on mobile devices. Many of the existing leading methods
employ machine-learning-based techniques, by which some enhancement parameters
for a given image are found by relating the image to the training images with
known enhancement parameters. While knowing the structure of the parameter
space can facilitate search for the optimal solution, none of the existing
methods has explicitly modeled and learned that structure. This paper presents
an end-to-end, novel joint regression and ranking approach to model the
interaction between desired enhancement parameters and images to be processed,
employing a Gaussian process (GP). GP allows searching for ideal parameters
using only the image features. The model naturally leads to a ranking technique
for comparing images in the induced feature space. Comparative evaluation using
the ground-truth based on the MIT-Adobe FiveK dataset plus subjective tests on
an additional data-set were used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the
proposed approach.
