Tone mapping for preserving contrast of fine features in an image

One or more tangible, non-transitory, computer-readable media, comprising instructions that cause pixel contrast control processing circuitry of an electronic device to:

• determine pixel statistics indicative of content of an image based at least in part on image data that indicates values of each pixel in the image, wherein the pixel statistics comprise a histogram of a frequency of each value of pixels of the image;
• determine an adjusted histogram by shifting each bin with low variance of a plurality of bins in the histogram to a next bin position such that each bin with low variance that maps to first output values that are comparatively higher than that of second output values are shifted to the next bin position, and wherein each bin with low variance corresponds to a monotonic region of the image;
• determine an adjusted tone curve based at least in part on the adjusted histogram, wherein the adjusted tone curve is configured to map the values to adjusted output values and not map each bin with low variance to the first output values based on the shift;
• and
• determine an output image data based at least in part on the adjusted tone curve and on the image data, wherein the output image data corresponds to an output image.