Adaptive Multi-Scale Retinex

Sounds pretty good, eh? Word on the street is that it's even better than contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalisation. Seems to have been invented a few times.

Those papers in full:

• An Adaptive Multi-Scale Retinex Algorithm Realizing High Color Quality and High-Speed Processing, Tatsumi Watanabe et al, Journal of Imaging Science and Technology 49(5) 486, Sep 2005
• Local Contrast Enhancement Based on Adaptive Multiscale Retinex Using Intensity Distribution of Input Image, In-Su Jang et al, Journal of Imaging Science and Technology 55(4) 040502-1 Jul 2011
• Adaptive Multi-Scale Retinex algorithm for contrast enhancement of real world scenes, Philip E. Robinson & Wing J. Lau, Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa, Nov 2012
• Adaptive Multiscale Retinex for Image Contrast Enhancement, Chang-Hsing Lee et al, International Conference on Signal-Image Technology & Internet-Based Systems (SITIS), Dec 2013

Haven't found any canned implementations, though.