Image enhancement using fuzzy intensity measure and adaptive clipping histogram equalization

Image enhancement aims at processing an input image so that the visual content of the output image is more pleasing or more useful for certain applications. Although histogram equalization is widely used in image enhancement due to its simplicity and effectiveness, it changes the mean brightness of the enhanced image and introduces a high level of noise and distortion. To address these problems, this paper proposes image enhancement using fuzzy intensity measure and adaptive clipping histogram equalization (FIMHE). FIMHE uses fuzzy intensity measure to first segment the histogram of the original image, and then clip the histogram adaptively in order to prevent excessive image enhancement. Experiments on the Berkeley database and CVF-UGR-Image database show that FIMHE outperforms state-of-the-art histogram equalization based methods

Multipurpose contrast enhancement on epiphyseal plates and ossification centers for bone age assessment

BACKGROUND: The high variations of background luminance, low contrast and excessively enhanced contrast of hand bone radiograph often impede the bone age assessment rating system in evaluating the degree of epiphyseal plates and ossification centers development. The Global Histogram equalization (GHE) has been the most frequently adopted image contrast enhancement technique but the performance is not satisfying. A brightness and detail preserving histogram equalization method with good contrast enhancement effect has been a goal of much recent research in histogram equalization. Nevertheless, producing a well-balanced histogram equalized radiograph in terms of its brightness preservation, detail preservation and contrast enhancement is deemed to be a daunting task. METHOD: In this paper, we propose a novel framework of histogram equalization with the aim of taking several desirable properties into account, namely the Multipurpose Beta Optimized Bi-Histogram Equalization (MBOBHE). This method performs the histogram optimization separately in both sub-histograms after the segmentation of histogram using an optimized separating point determined based on the regularization function constituted by three components. The result is then assessed by the qualitative and quantitative analysis to evaluate the essential aspects of histogram equalized image using a total of 160 hand radiographs that are implemented in testing and analyses which are acquired from hand bone online database. RESULT: From the qualitative analysis, we found that basic bi-histogram equalizations are not capable of displaying the small features in image due to incorrect selection of separating point by focusing on only certain metric without considering the contrast enhancement and detail preservation. From the quantitative analysis, we found that MBOBHE correlates well with human visual perception, and this improvement shortens the evaluation time taken by inspector in assessing the bone age. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed MBOBHE outperforms other existing methods regarding comprehensive performance of histogram equalization. All the features which are pertinent to bone age assessment are more protruding relative to other methods; this has shorten the required evaluation time in manual bone age assessment using TW method. While the accuracy remains unaffected or slightly better than using unprocessed original image. The holistic properties in terms of brightness preservation, detail preservation and contrast enhancement are simultaneous taken into consideration and thus the visual effect is contributive to manual inspection

Enhancement of Medical Images using Histogram Based Hybrid Technique

Digital Image Processing is very important area of research. A number of techniques are available for image enhancement of gray scale images as well as color images. They work very efficiently for enhancement of the gray scale as well as color images. Important techniques namely Histogram Equalization, BBHE, RSWHE, RSWHE (recursion=2, gamma=No), AGCWD (Recursion=0, gamma=0) have been used quite frequently for image enhancement. But there are some shortcomings of the present techniques. The major shortcoming is that while enhancement, the brightness of the image deteriorates quite a lot. So there was need for some technique for image enhancement so that while enhancement was done, the brightness of the images does not go down. To remove this shortcoming, a new hybrid technique namely RESWHE+AGCWD (recursion=2, gamma=0 or 1) was proposed. The results of the proposed technique were compared with the existing techniques. In the present methodology, the brightness did not decrease during image enhancement. So the results and the technique was validated and accepted. The parameters via PSNR, MSE, AMBE etc. are taken for performance evaluation and validation of the proposed technique against the existing techniques which results in better outperform

Performance Analysis of HE Methods for Low Contrast Images

AbstractThe image enhancement is one of the important issues in image processing. The main purpose is to highlight certain characteristic of image such as: contrast, sharpening. Histogram equalization is the well-known method for image enhancement. Histogram equalization became a popular technique because it is simple and effective. However Histogram equalization cause excessive contrast enhancement which cause visual artifacts of processed image. In this paper new forms of histogram equalization are overviewed to overcome this drawback. The major difference among the methods is the way to divide the input histogram. Recursive exposure based sub-image histogram equalization (R_ESIHE) use average intensity value as the separating point. Median-mean based sub-image clipped histogram equalization (MMSICHE) and Quadrants dynamic histogram equalization for contrast enhancement (QDHE) use median intensity value as separating point. Here objective parameters are Peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and Absolute Mean Brightness Error (AMBE)used to compare the quality of enhancement